Carrot Tops
by KF fan
Summary: Before either became Teen Titans, Kid Flash and Speedy met but didn't always get along.  Black Canary wants Roy and Wally to be friends so she invites Wally to stay a weekend in Star City with Roy
1. She who controls the food

Jinx was not the first girl Wally West had ever asked out.

But, ironically, it was the first time he'd ever had any good luck in such things.

Before that, something had always gone wrong, not just slightly wrong but completely wrong. Devastatingly wrong. Do not speak to me ever again, Wally West! That kind of wrong.

One such instance had involved Karen Parker. She was in most of Wally West's classes at Jump Ridge Junior High. She was a very smart, pretty girl, a petite brunette with glasses like a librarian. And, unlike some of the others, she hadn't been scared away by Wally West's sudden adoption of oversized pants and shirts and omnipresent hair concealing dark red knit hat as a virtual uniform in school. And, unlike some of the others she didn't look down on Wally because his family was poor. The Wests would have been relatively poor in most towns. But in the Jump Ridge section of Jump City where there was a 'Caviars R Us' store, where there was a "Truffles To Go" franchise store with a drive through window and where some kids' parents drove them to school in Bentleys and Rolls Royces, they were comparatively destitute. His family's relative poverty was like a visible, oozing sore to a lot of the girls, a sign of a deeper malady to be avoided at all costs.

But Karen Parker liked Wally. She thought he was cute even if he almost seemed to be trying to hide it. Maybe that was part of it. Those seemingly always downcast blue eyes! That little behind somewhere within those oversized pants!

And she liked that he was smart. Some of the jerks in 8th grade had made fun of Wally for years for reading more books than they were assigned. Karen groaned at their stupid remarks. She wished they'd stop but no matter how they mocked Wally, even after they locked him upside down in his locker or stuffed him into one of those narrow, high trash barrels so that only his head and feet showed above the top, god he must be flexible, Wally just dusted himself off and kept going. They couldn't change him.

Karen liked that resilience. Besides that, the rooms of her family's house were lined with bookcases. That reading and learning were wonderful things was part of the natural atmospher in which she was raised. And she noticed that he seemed almost indifferent to his teachers and his grades, not like some of the other smart kids who would've prostituted themselves to turn any stray B+ into an A. He really didn't care. She loved that.

The other thing she noticed about Wally West was that he seemed oddly distracted all the time. But he would make these amazing recoveries. He'd stare off into the distance all pre-calculus class long then the exasperated teacher would call on him. And call on him. And . .

It would always take two or three times to get his attention. The funniest times were when teachers walked right up to his desk and shouted at him from a foot away before he paid any attention to them. And then teachers would always ask him the hardest question possible. They wanted to humiliate him at that point for ignoring them. And he'd repeat their question then just reel off the exact answer. The kids loved it. In a way, it put some of the jerk teachers in their place. You're so indispensible, huh? Well, Wally West ignored you all class long and he still knew the answer! Ha!

Some of the teachers got burned often enough thinking they would put him in his place and not getting anywhere that they just left him alone. He would be free to sit there staring off into space out the window at whatever it was that was actually occupying his thoughts. It almost gave him an appealing air of mystery in Karen's eyes.

She gave him a half dozen clear opportunities to ask her out before he finally did, par for the course for an 8th grade boy. And they agreed that she would meet him at his house and go from there to the Jump City Theater, just over a mile away, to see a play. Well, she suggested that they do that and he agreed. He seemed to want to talk her out of seeing his house, embarassed at what she might think but it really was right along the way to the Theater so it made perfect sense. The only part where he'd added any input at all was to say that neither Saturday nor Sunday would do, it coudn't be before Monday.

With that, they separated, Wally wasn't sure if he should give her a quick peck on the cheek or a handshake or nothing. He leaned forward but she wasn't leaning forward and started to pull back. She started to lean forward but now he was pulling back and so she pulled back just as he was starting to lean forward again. They repeated this sort of stuttering motion again, both of them wanting to kiss but unsure about the other then perhaps more optimistic about the other but always out of synch till they separated having done nothing by default.

"Bye, Karen."

"Bye, Wally."

The reason Wally couldn't see her on Saturday or Sunday was because he was spending the weekend with Speedy, Green Arrow and Black Canary. Of course, Wally West, nearly 14 year old teen superhero Kid Flash to most of the world, didn't tell Karen that. He had to protect his secret identity. He still hadn't even told his family about his secret identity. So, when Black Canary suggested that Kid Flash stay the weekend at the home she shared with her husband, Green Arrow and his ward, Speedy, it wasn't something that Wally could tell his parents. Making things that much harder, there was also no way 8th grader Wally West could explain it as their civilian selves interacting. How could Wally West explain that he was going to spend the weekend at the Star City home of billionaire Oliver Queen.

Well, you see mom, this billionaire stopped by 8th grade study hall. It happens all the time.

Suuuuure.

For once it was actually good for Wally that his parents pretty much didn't care where he was, this weekend or any other. And they weren't about to check up on him. So, Saturday morning, Wally headed for the door and said something over his shoulder about staying at Aaron's house this weekend. His mother was just glad to have their insanely hungry, skinny, garbage disposal of a son out of the house so that other people had a chance to eat some dessert for a change. Neither she nor his father had any idea that Aaron and Wally hadn't been friends for months because Aaron got sick of Wally never showing up when he said he would, due, unbeknownst to Aaron to his nerd friend Wally running off to respond to police calls and generally do the work of a superhero. Funny thing about being the idol of millions. It tended to make you the actual friend of none.

Wally wasn't exactly best friends with Roy Harper, teen superhero Speedy to most of the world, either. They'd been around each other five times to that point. Their first meeting had been disastrous. Each had been brought up to the Justice League's earth orbiting satellite, The Watchtower, by his mentor. While Flash and Green Arrow went off on League business, they'd been left together in one of the rooms available for heroes staying over. By the end of that weekend, Kid Flash had wanted to beat the crap out of Speedy for the way the slightly older, slightly taller teen archer had consistently made fun of the teen speedster, mocking everything about him, his size, his appetite, his suit and his nerdyness. Kid Flash had been desperately trying to stay on his best behavior his first time in The Watchtower but the constantly mocking teen archer had pushed him to the limit.

Their second encounter had been brief. Kid Flash had been helping Flash on a case, something he loved to do, and they had met briefly with Green Arrow and Speedy. Green Arrow had made a joke about speedsters being hopeless nerds. Speedy had guffawed but all Kid Flash could do was keep his feelings of being offended to himself. He was sort of shocked that someone was criticizing Flash about, well, anything. Sure Flash was a bit nerdy. Okay very nerdy. Allright, insanely nerdy. But he was Flash, for god's sake! How could some Robin Hood knockoff criticize Flash? Kid Flash half wanted to take offense for Flash. In the end it didn't matter. Flash was running the show and he let the comment roll right off his crimson clad back.

Their third encounter hadn't been unfriendly but Kid Flash had been stunned at what Speedy had done. They'd both been brought up to the Justice League's Watchtower satellite for a day by their mentors. Speedy brought a dvd with some porn of beautiful girls kissing and making out. Kid Flash's eyes would have to have left his head to get any larger. He was shocked by Speedy's audacity. Porn! In the Watchtower? It seemed impossible.

Their fourth encounter had been in their secret identities. Uncle Barry took his nephew Wally to a Jump City Jumpers basketball game and who should they see there but billionaire Oliver Queen and his ward Roy Harper. Roy tripped Wally as he was leaving the concession stand with a soda and burger. Wally would've caught himself with his speed and instead dumped the soda over the head of Mr. Cool, Roy Harper wearing red lensed designer sunglasses indoors. He wanted to. But he saw two boys he knew from school just a few steps away. In a microsecond, Wally groaned. He had to. He had to let himself be humiliated. It was one of Flash's standing orders to him. Let things like that happen so that people will form a false impression of you and not think it possible that you're actually Kid Flash.

The soda splashed his face and hair and soaked the front of his Jumpers t-shirt. Roy laughed just like the two boys from school. Wally angrily cleaned himself up as well as he could at normal speed. "Hurray for me, reinforcing my secret identity," he muttered through clenched teeth in the bathroom as he pulled more paper towels from the dispenser on the wall.

Their fifth encounter had been better. Interviewed by one of the hosts for the 60 Minutes tv show, they were part of a story centered around the theme of a new generation of superheroes. Like most 60 Minutes stories, it was superficial fluff, just something that might catch the eye of viewers before they changed channels. They ran a clip from Speedy talking to the interviewer on all their promos, young, intelligent, a hero and, not coincidentally, very good looking and spandex clad.

Kid Flash and Speedy were on the set at the same time and Kid Flash was taken aback by how completely professional Speedy was in the things he said. The host asked dumb questions and irrelevant questions. Kid Flash half wondered if the intention was to get them angry so that they say something controversial by accident. But they both sidestepped these dumb questions and, Wally thought when seeing the broadcast of it, looked more mature than the host. They were interviewed together and the things they said dovetailed neatly, their perspectives seeming completely consistent to the audience. Sure there are some frustrations but they come with the job. You just have to accept them. It's a really fulfilling job, too. They both came across like pros. Flash told Kid Flash they'd done a great job afterward.

Kid Flash wondered where this Speedy had been the first three times he'd met him. He also felt a bit of skepticism that this was the real Speedy. But after the interview was over, they shook hands and gave each other a pat on the shoulder. And Speedy must've felt the same way about him because he gave him a pat on the butt and said "Nice job, KF."

So, when Speedy's mom or step mom, Kid Flash wasn't sure exactly which it was, Black Canary, always anxious to promote friendship between Roy and Wally, suggested that Wally stay over their house the following weekend, it was now pretty easy for Wally to agree.

Wally West left his family's house, jogged up the street, ducked into a stretch of woods, pulled off his normal clothes and pulled on his Kid Flash suit then stashed his regular clothes in the hollow of an oak tree and took off.

At that moment in the 15,000 square foot mansion at 21 Fairfax Lane at the center of the exclusive gated community outside Star City, Dinah Drake peered into her step son's room. She rolled her eyes. As usual, it was a complete mess. Arrows were strewn everywhere, literally everywhere, over the bed, nightstand, dresser, chairs and half the floor. He had on his Speedy uniform but without the mask. In one hand he had a 25 pound dumbell with which he was doing curls. In the other he had what looked like powdered plastic explosive with which to make some new kind of arrow.

She sighed. Typical.

She leaned in the doorway. "Roy. Wally's going to be here any minute now. Did you and he have any specific plans?"

Roy gave his usual smirk. Dinah sighed. The boy should try another facial expression now and then.

"I told him I'd show him how to shoot arrows and teach him some acrobatics," said Roy before letting out a grunt and pumping out some more curls.

Dinah nodded and walked away down the 100 foot long hallway to the master bedroom. As she considered this, her thoughts filled more and more with worry. All she could picture was Roy mocking Wally for not shooting as well as he did. The more she thought about it the more she imagined Roy and Wally driven apart by the friction. She had an anxious expression on her face when she entered the room where her husband, Oliver Queen, was meticulously grooming his blond beard in the mirror. She stepped around the fifty thousand dollar carved rosewood sleigh bed to look over his shoulder into the gilt edged japanese mirror.

"What is it, honey?"

"Ollie, I want to do something that'll bring Roy and Wally together."

"You . . . want 'em to be singing kumbaya around a fire or something?" he quipped combing the upturned curl into his beard one more time.

"Ollie! I just don't want them competing. Roy says he's supposed to teach Wally archery today. Knowing Roy, how will that not devolve into a competition between them? You know the way Roy is. He-" She caught herself and then let out a slow sigh and hugged Ollie about the shoulders. "I just want Roy and Wally to be friends. They're gonna be teammates for most of their lives, aren't they? I want them to form bonds before Roy . . well, you know how Roy can be so . . abrasive."

"Well what about Wally? What kind of kid is he? Is he like Barry?" asked Green Arrow before adding, "If he is, we could just leave him with a deluxe chemistry set in the basement of the guest house and come back for him after a couple days," snickered Ollie.

Dinah slapped his shoulder. "Ollie! You are not going to talk like that in front of Wally! Do you hear me? Besides . . . I think nerdy guys are cute."

"Hmmph. As cute as swashbuckling archers?"

She rubbed his shoulder, enjoying the feel of the muscle. "Don't be silly. But that sort of innocent fixation can be . . adorable."

"Well, is little red and yellow just like red?"

"I . . . think so, maybe not so nerdy as Barry but pretty much."

Ollie snickered and rolled his eyes. "Kind of funny, in a way that two total nerds end up wearing suits like that. My god. I didn't think nerds were exhibitionists."

Dinah slapped his shoulder one more time. "You will not make fun of the boy for his suit this weekend. Do you hear me?"

Ollie nodded. "Yessssss dear. Whatever you sayyyyyyy dear . . . . So, what do you want to do?"

"I don't know. I-I just want something nice for him and maybe something where they're Roy and Wally and not Speedy and Kid Flash."

"How 'bout we go to Six Flags Star City? You and I can be with them a little of the time, separate most of the time and let them go around as just Roy and Wally like you said."

Dinah stared at him a moment in shock. Just when she thought Ollie had no understanding or sensitivity he would come through with one of these things. She hugged him again and kissed his cheek. "That's perfect, Ollie!"

Ollie basked in her adoration before finally muttering, "Course, Kid Flash might have his heart set on seeing what it takes to be an archer."

Dinah separated from him with another sigh and walked out into the hall to the marble staircase then down to the grand entrance. Ollie was right. If Wally had his heart set on trying to play archer that could be a problem. She glanced at the ornate clock by the foyer, more than 300 years old, taken from the palace at Versailles and still accurate to the second. 9:58. Wally was due in two minutes.

She tried to think of how to steer the teen speedster away from trying to keep up with Speedy at archery if that was what he really wanted to do. She puzzled over how to smoothly redirect the boy the way she wanted. And then, suddenly, she saw the solution.

There, on the antique Louis XV table was a tray with the special pastries that Francois, their chef, had whipped up yesterday.

She smiled and then the smile broke into a slight chuckle remembering Iris's line, "She who controls the food controls the speedster."

Iris had said that sleek, ridiculously toned Barry ate six or seven meals a day. Not by choice. He had to. And thirteen, nearly fourteen year old Wally, right at the age when even normal boys are eating so much food that it amazes their parents, was even worse, wolfing down eight or even nine meals in a day according to Iris.

She remembered Iris talking about her occasional exasperation with Barry and his dedication to his civilian job as a police scientist, as well as his random scientific fixations, all on top of the demands of being a superhero. She said something about going down to his basement lab at 2 in the morning only to find Barry working away and only being able to pry him out of there by luring him with a platter of meats, drawing him up, piece by piece, to their bedroom, him being unable to resist and all the while protesting that he wasn't a dog or something and she shouldn't treat him like that. She made him undress for the last piece. So adorable. And that speedster butt! On top of that, Iris had said he could vibrate his . . !

Dinah let out a slow, dignity recovering sigh while consciously shifting her thoughts.

She picked up the silver platter of pastries just as the doobell rang. Through the crystal cut in the shape of chrysanthemums beside the huge entrance door, she could see Kid Flash in his red and yellow suit looking around nervously, making sure no one saw him. Of course, the Queen mansion was in the middle of 40 acres. No one could see their front door.

Dinah pulled the heavy door open and he zipped inside.

"Hi, Black Canary," he waved. "Where's Speedy?"

"Upstairs, but -"

He was gone before she could get out another syllable and finish closing the door. She grabbed the platter of pastries, some kind of multi-layered french things, and jogged up the marble staircase. At the top she turned right and there she saw Kid Flash just inside Roy's room. She advanced to the doorway with the silver platter behind her back. The two of them were kneeling on the floor and Speedy was showing Kid Flash one of his arrows.

"Speedy's gonna teach me archery!" chirped Kid Flash looking up at her.

Speedy snickered. "Try to, anyway."

"You're not going to do anything until you pick up this room, Roy Harper!" she demanded. But Speedy didn't move. A couple of smirking glances passed back and forth between the two boys whereupon a red and yellow blur filled the room for the next few seconds. When this two toned teen tornado stopped, two seconds later, all Speedy's arrows were neatly lined up against the walls and the whole room was clean. Even the bed was made.

"Done," grinned Kid Flash.

Black Canary raised an eyebrow, impressed. "You're an awful handy one, aren't you?" she said patting his head. The way he blushed was adorable.

"But Ollie and I had something else in mind for today," she said and as she did, held up the platter of their chef's gourmet french pastries. She moved it a little to the left then a little to the right as she spoke. Kid Flash's head turned a little to the left then a little to the right in synch with it.

"We think you two should do something as Roy and Wally not Speedy and Kid Flash. The four of us are gonna go to Six Flags Star City and we'll spend some time there at the amusement park with you guys and you guys can have some time to yourselves."

As she finished, she held the platter out as far her right hand could go and Kid Flash, just inches in front of her, ended up facing away from her to that side.

"Jeez, I was looking forward to a 10 quiver day today," groused Speedy.

"You can train any time, Roy. Today'll be something different."

"But, Kid Flash really wanted to try some archery, didn't you, KF?" suggested Speedy looking for some help.

Black Canary passed the platter of special pastries slowly, just inches in front of Kid Flash.

A disoriented " . . . . um . . . . " was all he could manage, before licking both his lips.

"And they've got all the rides, the super high coaster and the upside down twister coaster and a midway with all sorts of attractions and 35 different places to eat."

Kid Flash silently mouthed the words "thirty five".

Black Canary nodded.

"And every kind of fried dough and cotton candy snack sort of thing imaginable."

"Fried dough!" lip synched Kid Flash with the same excitement as a prospector might use in saying "gold".

"So, are you guys okay with that?" asked Black Canary, one eyebrow raised as she chose one pastry off the tray to hold an inch from Kid Flash's nose.

"Well-" began Speedy.

"Yes!" said Kid Flash snatching the pastry from her hands and eating it so fast that the only part of its consumption that she saw was him swallowing.

"Okay, you guys change into some normal clothes and meet us downstairs," she said before holding that platter out toward Kid Flash again. And, again, he ate one of the pastries so fast that she only saw him swallow.

"She who controls the food controls the speedster," she laughed in a whisper to herself as she went down the hallway.


	2. Diabolical Ennui and Mystic Maria

Speedy immediately started pulling off his red uniform top, casually undressing like it was a locker room. Kid Flash first waited to see what Speedy would do then followed suit. He stopped with his one piece uniform half off, down to his waist, before turning to Speedy and asking if it was okay if he borrowed his stuff. Sure, said Speedy continuing to pull off his red uniform pants.

Kid Flash zipped over to the dresser and opened the top drawer. Underwear, just as he'd guessed, but what a bizarre variety of underwear! As Kid Flash pulled off his uniform the rest of the way he was also gawking at the contents of the drawer, filled on one side with girls' underpants. Girls'! He was about to say something about all the multicolored panties when Speedy chuckled.

"Oh my god, dude, did I see . . was that . . . do you wear a dance belt under that suit?"

Kid Flash ground his teeth together, thanks a lot, Uncle Barry!

"Yeah, it's what Flash gave me to wear."

Speedy chuckled a few more times. "That whole suit is nuts but I'll give you credit, you are crazy cut, dude," he allowed. Kid Flash was going to say something back about Speedy wearing GIRLS' underwear when it dawned on him how he'd gotten them. Ohmygod . . he must've gotten girls to give him them after . . . !

After . . !

Wally sighed. He couldn't even arrange a single date without things going wrong while Roy had, apparently, done the deed with dozens of girls. Life is definitely not fair. He scanned the dresser drawer again. There were at least twenty of them! There were all sorts of styles from racy and lacy to plain. Kid Flash sighed and tried to pick out a pair from the other side of the drawer where it was all boys' underwear. But, something was odd there, too. There were all kinds of boxers and stretchy boxer briefs. But as he picked through them he didn't see more than one of any kind. Didn't they come in three packs, usually? There was a pair of stretchy boxer briefs with horizontal stripes, another with vertical stripes, a third that was all black and another that was all white. There was a pair of red plaid boxers, orange plaid, hunter green, light blue, light yellow, polka dotted, dotted with lacrosse players, dotted with hearts. But not more than one of any kind. Wally picked a pair at random, the ones dotted with lacross players, and pulled them on. They were loose at the waist but okay.

He turned around and Roy was pulling on a pair himself by the closet. Roy quickly pulled on a pair of worn chinos and a t-shirt for a band Wally had never heard of. He tossed another pair of chinos to Wally who pulled them on, surprising Roy that they were not too long for him even though year older Roy was an inch and a half taller than him. But they were simultaneously snug in the rear and ridiculously loose at the waist of the young speedster. Roy smirked and got a braided leather belt for Wally. "Here." Wally pulled the belt on, cinching it to make the pants snug about his waist then feeding the extra length through the loop at the side and all the way to one in the back.

Roy stepped forward with a roll of his green eyes and a sigh. "Don't be such a nerd, Wally." He pulled the end of the belt out of the loop in the back and also out of the loop on the side. The extra length of belt now dangled down the front of the pants. Wally raised an eyebrow. Really?

Roy nodded. "Much cooler," he declared.

Wally shrugged. He stared at it. It seemed odd to him but, okay.

He was hit in the face by a t-shirt tossed by Roy.

"This'll make you seem much cooler than you are, too."

Wally held it up. It was white with the screened on image of some apparent band members on one side and some larger images of people recoiling in horror on the other side with the band's name below.

"Diabolical Ennui?"

"They're the next big thing."

"Really?"

"Wally," Roy looked him right in the eye. "What's the atomic number of potassium?"

"19, but why-"

"See, Wally, you know speedster things. I know cool things. Archer things."

Wally sighed. What. Ever. He and Roy pulled on socks and sneakers, two pairs of Roy's Chuck Taylor Converse All Star high tops, black for Roy and white for Wally. Roy put on a pair of red lensed Oakley sunglasses and they went downstairs where Oliver Queen and Dinah Drake, not Green Arrow and Black Canary, waited for them.

Wally noticed that Oliver Queen suddenly had no goatee. Thinking about it, he realized that he always looked that way in pictures. Ollie saw him staring and pointed to the ring on his left hand ring finger.

"Wedding ring and cloaking ring," he explained. He took it off for a moment and suddenly his blond goatee was visible. Wally nodded, impressed at the simplicity of this secret identity protection and Ollie put the wedding/cloaking ring back on.

Dinah stepped forward and hugged both boys. She was delighted at how the two of them looked, pronouncing several times how they looked to all the world like brothers. Big brother Roy! And little brother Wally! She pronounced them "adorable" several times. Too cool for school Roy Harper mostly rolled his eyes and grudgingly played along. Wally West smiled with delight.

Dinah took pictures of them with a digital camera and went on some more about how they really did look like they were brothers. Don't they, Ollie, she prodded. Ollie agreed, at least partly because he saw how much this doting attention was starting to annoy Roy. But now Dinah stared at the two boys with a slight frown and pronounced that she was dissatisfied with Wally's hair. She pulled him into the bathroom and took a comb to his orange hair. He had quickly run his fingers through it sweeping it backward, the way it spilled out the top of his Kid Flash uniform. She carefully combed a part into his hair from one side and swept it over to one side but also back from part of the front. Good boy and sort of cool at the same time. Seeing his reflection, Wally was surprised at how good he looked this way. As he did, Dinah looked him front and back. You are just completely a speedster, aren't you, she eventually pronounced.

He grinned and nodded. She couldn't resist hugging him.

Ready now, they trooped into the gold Bentley in the driveway. They didn't have a less conspicuous option, their other cars being a Maybach, a $450,000 MacLaren Mercedes, a Rolls Royce and a Ferrari. While Oliver Queen deftly piloted the $250,000 sedan through traffic to the amusement park weaving expertly in and out, Dinah Drake leaned over the back of the front seat and talked to the two incognito teen heroes in the back as well as to her husband.

She explained that she wanted them to spend some time as Roy and Wally, not Speedy and Kid Flash for a change. Roy and Wally. She implored the two boys to refrain from going into costume unless they absolutely had to. She said that maybe the two boys could become better friends if they got to know Roy and Wally rather than just some other boy hero in a costume. As with her pronouncing that they looked like brothers, Roy just sort of seemed to put up with it while Wally listened intently. Ollie didn't say much. He made one quip, after Dinah said that maybe they could become better friends when the other guy wasn't a boy hero in a costume, "especially when the cother guy's costume shows every square inch of 'im" but immediately recoiled in pain after Dinah's hand reached, here let me help you with that, and adjusted his collar. She had the cheeriest tone of voice to her, "Oh, sorry honey!"

Wally noted Roy's smirk at this.

Dinah segued into mostly talking to Wally asking him about Aunt Iris and also Ralph Dibney, the Elongated Man. But she didn't want to know about being on a mission with Elongated Man. She wanted to know if Wally had ever been over to his house and met Sue Dibney. Had he met them as normal people while being a normal boy himself? Wally recounted the afternoon he'd spent at their house followed by dinner. He told them how nice both Dibneys had been to him and asked if Roy had met him.

Roy said he hadn't and added that stretching was a totally overrated power because if you stretched your arm out a hundred yards you couldn't hit anybody with any force at that point anyway. You had no leverage.

They were just arriving at the park entrance and Dinah admonished him to lay off the super powers and superhero talk inside.

"You'd like him," said Wally, "He's really cool."

Roy sighed.

"What's the atomic number of platinum?" he asked Wally.

"78," said Wally casually, "But what's that got to do with-"

"I don't know if a guy who knows something like that off the top of his head but doesn't know who Diabolical Ennui is really knows if anyone's cool."

Ollie laughed but Dinah grimaced. "Roy, there are different ways to be cool," Dinah explained patiently as they all unbuckled and got out of the Bentley.

For the first half hour or so, they all stayed together, like a family out for a day of fun. They went on the highest roller coaster in the park and then two more rides. To Roy's annoyance, people in line for rides next to them were convinced that he and Wally were brothers. What a pair of handsome ginger brothers you have, exclaimed one woman. Are you two twins, gasped another.

"Uh, I'm an inch and a half taller than squirt here," said Roy pointing to Wally. "And a year older."

The woman shrank bank in embarassment. But Ollie reveled in Roy's annoyance. After the rides, Dinah, who was now insisting that Wally call her "Aunt Dinah", bought everyone pizza and cokes at a concession stand. Wally could not have been much more happy. But Roy was itching to break off from Ollie and Dinah. After they ate they agreed to meet back there, not far from the park entrance, in three hours.

Roy and Wally took off heading toward some of the older rides which had some games next to them. Without either planning it that way, Roy immediately took on the role of leader. It was in everything about him, the way he walked, his body language, the things he said. He practically demanded that other people look at him while Wally went about with his hands in the pockets of his chinos and his shoulders slightly hunched much of the time. Roy directed Wally this way and that, choosing which rides they would go on and always going first at any of the games. Wally noticed but didn't much care.

He also noticed Roy's incredible aim. No matter what the game was, he didn't miss. He never missed, it seemed. They had gone on a sort of spinning ride and got off next to a game where you had to shoot out the red star on a piece of paper 15 feet away using a bb gun made to look like an M-16. Wally tried his best but was convinced that the game was rigged and impossible to win. He gave the guy running the game a dollar three times over but never shot out more than half the star. Roy won three prizes. He casually shot the first burst of bb's and noted where the bb's went compared to the aim of the gun then shot a circle out of the paper and knocked the star out with his last burst. Wally watched him and tried to do that his last time. He still only got half the star.

They went to an adjacent game at which you tossed large plastic rings eight inches across onto targets 10 to 15 feet away. The surfaces on which you had to have the rings land were all hard. It was almost impossible not to have the rings bounce off onto the ground. In three dollars worth of tries Wally couldn't get more than one ring on any target at any time. Roy tossed ring after ring right onto all the targets.

Finally, they went to one of the most common games anywhere, one where you had to shoot water into a clown's mouth and thereby inflate a balloon. If you shot enough water in, you would overinflate the balloon and it would pop winning you a prize. Wally couldn't quite get the balloon to pop in four exasperating tries.

Pop!

Pop!

Pop!

Pop!

Roy won every time. By now, he would have had 10 prizes, stuffed animals or things like that that he'd have to carry around. But every time Roy won he just turned around and gave the prize to a pretty girl although once to another boy.

"Do you every miss?" Wally chuckled as they walked away from the last game.

"Not if the target's stationary," said Roy.

Wally asked if Roy wouldn't mind him getting something else to eat. Roy shrugged. Sure. They went to an ice cream stand and while Wally licked away at a large waffle cone of strawberry, Roy began a Roy style apology.

"Look, I'm sorry about making fun of your nerdyness back there, the, uh, atomic numbers and everything. But, I mean, come on. I understand. I mean, Ollie says everybody at the league talks like Flash is the biggest nerd on the planet. So, you probably get dragged into some of that, right?"

Wally shrugged and kept licking the cone.

"Every league subgroup has its own thing. Archers? Well, we're cool. Bats? Uptight psychos. Aquas? Jerks. Supers? Humorless stiffs. The public thinks we're all the same but every type of hero rolls a different way. And everyone gets that type of villain," explained Roy.

"unn hunnh"

"Batman gets psychos. Aquaman gets jerks. Flash gets . . science geeks," Roy chuckled.

"Hey!"

"What? They all have, like, one science project thing they use against Flash. A heat gun or a cold gun or a weather changing thing or a gun that does something else. God what a crew of lab coat misfits you guys have! If Flash had just kept an eye on science fairs for the last five years he could've saved you guys a lot of trouble. And the things they've done to you!" Roy burst out laughing.

"My god. Turned you into puppets, turned you into mirrors, made you super fat-"

"Not to us!" corrected Wally and looking around to make sure no one was close enough to listen before licking at his cone a few times more. "To-to Flash!"

"They didn't turn you into a puppet or a mirror or a giant tortoise or-"

"That was grandpa Jay, not me or Flash!"

"Who?"

"Jay Garrick, the Flash from Earth 2. Abra Kadabra turned him into a giant tortoise," said Wally before reacting angrily to Roy's snickering. "It's not funny. He turned Superman into a puppet at the same time which should show you how powerful he is. But, for the record, I've never been transformed into anything."

"You never got blimped out? I thought I heard that you got supersized the same time Flash did, that one time."

"No!" declared Wally rubbing his hands down his sides past his hips and shuddering in horror at the thought of being turned into a super wide load.

"God," chuckled Roy. "That was funny. They showed the footage from that security camera over and over on CNN. In, like, ten seconds, Flash becoming the guy with the most junk in his trunk on the whole planet. Oh god," laughed Roy.

"Yeah, hilarious," muttered Wally finishing the last of his ice cream cone.

"One more game?" suggested Roy changing the subject and pointing to another old standby game where players had to throw baseballs at stacked milk bottles. Wally shrugged. Sure.

Again, despite trying three times, Wally couldn't win anything. Roy played twice and won twice. Again, he had prizes to give away. A hot looking blond girl about their age was walking by. To Wally's amazement, Roy didn't even say anything. Not a word. He just looked at the blond girl. She stopped and looked at Roy. Roy lowered his red lensed Oakleys and stared at her again. He walked up to her and took her hand in his leading her away between two tents on the other side of the main walking lane then to the left between two other tents and out of sight.

Wally sighed. He sighed again unable to think of anything but his total inability to get anywhere with the girls at school while Roy was spending upwards of ten seconds to seduce girls he'd never met. Unbelievable.

He waited there 15 or 20 minutes. He wasn't sure exactly how long it was. He gave away Roy's prizes, stuffed animals to two pretty girls. He tried to look them in the eye and create some kind of almost magical connection of passion like Roy had. The girls just looked at him like there was something wrong with him.

All of a sudden, there was Roy beside him fidgeting with his pants.

"Hey," was all he offered as both greeting and explanation.

Wally rolled his eyes. "Hey. Um . . . would you like to get something to eat?"

"You're hungry again?"

Wally shrugged. He suggested another stand at one corner of all the midway tents where, again, fried dough was available. Roy didn't have any and marveled at Wally wolfing down yet another serving with cinnamon on top in just a few seconds. Wally let out a huge sigh of satisfaction and then a burp after finishing his soda. He threw his paper plate and empty drink into the trash and they headed off down one lane of the midway tents.

Nothing too much caught their attention though Wally did notice that Roy kept fidgeting with his pants. There was a bearded lady tent, one for a supposed goat boy and another for a palm reader. Roy and Wally practically yawned. Not interested. Then they came upon an opening where an employee was barking out comments to anyone who went by to get them to try the "Test Your Strength!" machine. It was one of those classic deals where a customer would try to slam a giant wooden mallet down on the base of a stand hard enough to send the metal bead shooting up to the top of the display, ten fight high, where it would ring a bell attesting to the strength of the customer. But if the customer didn't get the metal bead to shoot all the way up, there were comments rating his strength, from respectful at the top to insulting at the bottom.

As Roy and Wally approached, a fat college kid was giving it a try. With great effort he swung the oversized wooden mallet in a circle, whoomp, down on the target at the base. The metal bead only rose part way up the stand to "Not Feeling So Fresh?" Fatso's buddies almost fell down laughing. Roy and Wally guffawed too and the fat college kid looked at them angrily. "Think you can do better, squirts?"

Roy nodded. Wally looked at him. What're you doing?

The fat frat boy walked over and stood the mallet in front of Wally.

"Hey! You gotta pay ta play!" reminded the park employee. Roy went over and gave the guy the requisite dollar for each of them while Wally stared at the mallet. Ugh. Strength was not his thing. A lot of what he did in fights was using his speed to get around his lack of strength. If a crook or villain was really strong, he might have to punch him 50 times to knock him out. Whatever it took, he did. He worked around his lack of muscle power.

But how could he work around this? The handle was three feet long. The head of it was a frayed edged wood cylinder a foot long and six inches diameter. It looked heavy to 103 pound Wally West, really heavy. He grabbed it in his hands, tried to get a sense of its weight, stepped forward and swung, whoomp, he smacked the base and the metal bead went up the center rod only to "Don't Break a Nail, Toots!" the level just below "Not Feeling So Fresh". There was laughter all around, though the fat kid's friends did note that the orange haired kid didin't even weigh close to half of what their friend did and had hit the thing nearly as hard.

Roy was next. He walked over to Wally without a word but projecting complete confidence which seemed odd to Wally as Roy might outweigh him by a bit but not much. Roy took the huge mallet then took several steps away from the machine, then several more seeming to measure the distance as he went. He directed a couple spectators further to the side off that line Everyone was perplexed. He was now 30 feet away from the machine. Then he took two running steps, brought the mallet back and started his swing as he leaped in the air and came down with every ounce of his weight and strength on the base of the machine before his feet had even touched ground. The metal bead shot up to the top of the machine slamming into the bell with a clang that could be heard at the other end of the park. The fifteen or twenty people in the area cheered and clapped and Roy walked over and dropped the mallet at the feet of the fat college kid.

"Try the dojo instead of the donuts once in a while," he quipped and he and Wally walked off while the crowd laughed at that fat college kid. Wally patted his back and congratulated him as they walked away.

"How'd you know to do that?" he asked as they passed by another lackluster side show.

"The principles are simple, man. Use everything you've got and focus your power to all be expressed at impact."

Wally nodded and repeated it to himself. He patted Roy's back again and noticed that Roy was, again, constantly fidgeting with his pants.

"What's the matter with you?" he finally asked.

"That girl! She wanted mine this time. I like everything I wear to be exactly right. The drape and line of these pants is off now. Commando just feels wrong in these."

Wally's eyes went wide. He stammered but said nothing. They were now in front of the Tilt-a-whirl ride and decided to go on it.

Roy and Wally had just got off the Tilt-a-Whirl ride, when they bumped into three asian american boys. Asian american was the term that came to Wally's mind because the two slightly shorter ones somehow looked a bit different from the one taller one. Maybe they were japanese american and the taller one was chinese american or maybe it was vice versa. Or maybe the taller one was korean. He wasn't sure.

The three of them had been on that same ride of the Tilt-a-Whirl and Roy and Wally had seen them goofing around the same way they were. When they all got off they literally bumped into each other because a mom with two kids was taking forever to get past the gate at the exit to the ride. Roy and Wally apologized and fell into a conversation with the other three. They stopped and talked beside the low fence outside the ride. Actually, things quickly broke into two conversations, Roy with Jerry, the tallest one, also wearing a pair of Oakleys and chinos and band's t-shirt and also clearly the coolest of their group and Wally with Dean and Joe the two nerdy ones wearing jeans and t-shirts for Star City's basketball team.

One minute they were introducing themselves and the next minute, Dean was joking how the older much smaller roller coaster on this side of the park actually looked scarier than the super coaster because it looked like integral support brackets had significant corrosion on them. Wally chuckled and agreed and wondered if the old rides even traveled at the speed they were expected to go any more because the tracks seemed almost rusted and might have a different coefficient of friction. Dean and Joe nodded. Exactly! Or the same coefficient of restitution when their suppost beams vibrated. The three of them went on in a similar vein for five minutes about the changing physical condition of the rides and how to scientifically model these differences till all of a sudden they looked around and saw that Roy and Jerry weren't there.

They glanced around in all directions but couldn't see them and shrugged it off figuring the two Mr. Cools must've gone off to get something to eat. They lapsed back into their scientific observations about Six Flags Star City till, out of the blue, Joe remarked to Wally, "Anybody ever tell you you look a lot like Kid Flash?"

In a nanosecond, Wally slouched lower. He'd gotten very good at slouching enough to make his five foot four seem like five three at most. Both Dean and Joe were five four, too, eighth graders just like him but at a private school there in Star City.

"Yeah, I get that sometimes," he said pointing to his head. "It's the hair."

"Course he's like five seven and you're, what?"

"Five three," shrugged Wally.

It never failed. They always thought Kid Flash was taller than he was and that Wally was shorter. Even serious Kid Flash fans seemed to make that mistake. As they talked some more, both Dean and Joe said they were Kid Flash fans and Dean laughed and pointed to his pal, "especially him!"

Wally said that he was sort of a Kid Flash fan. "The dude's good for us gingers, that's for sure!" But felt compelled to criticize that other person as a little extra secret identity protection. "But I wouldn't wear that gay ass suit if you paid me to."

Dean and Joe chuckled. "He was at our school once, for like 2 minutes," said Dean. "And, yeah, that suit is hella tight."

"Oh, like you should be making fun of anything tight," laughed Joe.

Joe started to say something more when Dean jumped him and the two started wrestling. They were evenly matched, both about Wally's actual height and weight. Finally Joe broke free and between laughs told Wally, "He . . he used to do . . ballet!"

With the release of the secret, the wrestling match ended. They looked for Wally's reaction. He just shrugged.

"For the record," explained Dean obviously feeling very much like he had to explain, "My mom put me in that class when I was 6. And, yeah, it was the whole thing, tights and leotard and dance belt, the whole deal. But, I got to make out with three of the ballerinas after classes unlike somebody," he nodded at Joe, "who hasn't even kissed a girl. So, who's the real man?"

"I kissed Megan Phelan!" protested Joe.

"You did not. You like brushed the very edge of your lip on her cheek and she fricking recoiled."

"But it's a better cheek than those ballerinas you were macking it with."

A suitable standoff reached, they both laughed.

"He's like the biggest Kid Flash fan in Star City," said Dean pointing to Joe.

They all talked some more about Kid Flash and Flash. Wally wanted to correct their misconceptions. Kid Flash did NOT get turned into a puppet like Flash did. Kid Flash did NOT get literally flattened and turned into a mirror like Flash did and he most definitely did NOT get blimped out like Flash did. He started to say something to correct Dean and Joe about these things but realized he should just let them go. How would he explain his certainty about these things? He just let them go but jumped in again when they started making fun of Robin. A green speedo, bare legs and elf shoes! Ahahahaha!

"And he's massively cooler than, um, who's the little green guy with Doom Patrol?"

"Beast Boy."

"Yeah, that's the one. Beast Boy.

The discussion of super heroes peetered out there and Wally, Dean and Joe returned to the issue of the physics of the various rides. They were deep in a discussion of which ride threw you hardest into your seat when the two Mr. Cools returned.

"But your seat on the tilt-a-whirl is also moving about its own axis and I think that if you spin your seat in the same direction as the rotation of the seat base is rotating and at the same moment as you reach the outer circle of the ride, combining with the rotation of the whole machine," said Wally adding hand gestures to demonstrate, "then your moment arm would be-"

All of a sudden, there was Roy beside him and Jerry next to him, both shaking their heads. "I don't know who's worse, my nerd friend or yours," he said to Jerry.

"Mine."

"Don't be so sure."

"You guys go to get something to eat?" asked Dean.

"Yeah," answered Jerry. But before the conversation got any further, Jerry shepherded his two nerds in one direction and Roy pushed Wally in the other.

"What?" complained Wally. "I liked those guys."

"He's gotta go," explained Roy. "Besides, I want to see more of this park."

Wally shrugged. Roy led him around. They caught a glimpse of Ollie and Dinah in the distance at one point while high up on a ride. And then they went off through some more clusters of side show tents. They had gone by several which didn't much interest them when they shuffled in front of the tent for The Mystic Maria. What caught their eyes, at first was the picture. Maria was a beautiful young woman with an amazing figure somehow scantily clad in a sort of fortune teller's outfit with gypsy overtones and a cape. The sign showed a sort of effervescent explosion of stars from Mystic Maria's crystal ball and promised that she would tell you your future in phrasings that didn't quite set off either boy's "bullshit!" reaction.

Roy looked at Wally.

Wally looked at Roy.

What do you think? I guess so.

What do you think? Sure.

They walked up to the entrance to the tent where the overlapping flap had been pulled closed. A small sign advised them to ring a bell on a battered wooden stand next to the flap. Roy rang the bell. A voice from inside the tent with a chicago accent said," Just a minute, I'll be right dere."

The flap of the tent opened just enough for the two boys to see one eye. The eye took in the two redheads. "Allright boys. Your fortunes aren't free. That'll be 10 bucks each."

Wally sputtered. Ten bucks! For . . probably nothing worthwhile!

Roy gave the woman a twenty. The flap of the tent opened. Wally followed Roy inside. The tent was split into two compartments with another flap dividing the back third of the tent from the main body of the tent. As that flap diminished its back and forth swaying Wally saw a chair, table and a paperback book beside a candle. More candles dimly lit the main portion of the tent and there were three small chairs around the perimeter of it. A small round table with a purple lace table cloth beneath the promised crystal ball sat in the middle of this area with a chair on each side of the table.

Mystic Maria sat down on one side of the table, Roy on the other. And quickly he saw that the Mystic Maria pictured on the sign had perhaps been captured thirty years or thirty pounds ago. The two boys did not very well hide their crestfallen reaction.

"Allright, allright, let's get this show on the road," said Mystic Maria. "What's your name, kid?"

"Roy."

"Roy, Mystic Maria needs something from you to establish the connection to your mystic . . future!" she said finishing with a flourish of waving hand gestures."

"Like what?"

"A hair or something."

Roy pulled the comb from his pocket and pulled off a single red hair that he handed to her. She mumbled something in a language unintelligible to either boy and dropped the hair on top of the crystal ball where it disappeared in a flash of light and a puff of smoke. She grabbed Roy's hand and started a series of chants beseeching the "great beyond" to reveal to them Rick's, she corrected herself, Roy's future. Roy glanced over to Wally at the side of the tent with a skeptically raised eyebrow. Mystic Maria chanted some unintelligible words in a high pitched voice. She chanted in a much lower voice. Mystic Maria began some sort of gutteral mumbling. All the while, the crystal ball progressively clouded over. Finally, there was a flash of light, like a thunderclap and lightning bolt within the crystal ball itself and the flames of the candles lighting the tent flickered.

"The great beyond is now ready to yield the secrets of Rick's-"

"Roy's!"

"-of Roy's future to Mystic Maria!"

Roy shot another skeptical glance over toward Wally.

"Fortune is smiling upon you, Ri-Roy! Mystic Maria can see many aspects of your future unfolding. But you must choose between your future career and your future romance so that Maria's eye to what lies ahead for you can focus more clearly."

"Romance." said Roy.

Mystic Maria waved her hands around the crystal ball and did more unintelligible chanting before leaning forward and staring into the crystal ball.

"I seeeeee . . quite clearly, a dark haired girl . . the more clearly Mystic Maria sees the girl, the more clearly she is the love of your life. Mystic Maria sees this girl very clearly."

"A dark haired . . girl, huh?"

"Yes. I see you and this girl . . but you are . . fighting, yes fighting you are fighting, not just arguing but fighting in hand to hand combat. She-"

"Hey! No way! I'd never hit a girl!"

"The mystic revelation of the future does not lie."

"I don't lie, either and I don't hit girls."

"Mostly, she is hitting you . . . I see . . I see her beating you up-"

"What?"

"Yes . . the dark haired girl knocks you out-"

Wally snickered and Roy shot him an angry glance.

"-she knocks you out and then I . . I feel . . I feel cold . . you are tremendously cold . . and then you are fine but you are intrigued by this girl who beat you. You cannot stop thinking about this girl-"

"I would never lose a fight to some girl!" groused Roy, still upset.

"You were beat up by this girl and you fall in love with her. And she is smitten with the skinny boy she beat and the two of you have a little girl together. That is the story of your romantic future as revealed by Mystic Maria!"

More hand gestures.

Roy got up from his chair grumbling about the absurdity that a girl could beat him up. Wally stepped forward to take his place snickering. He approached the center table noting that Mystic Maria was watching him very closely. He sat down and looked her in the eye as she took one of his hands in hers.

"What's your name kid?"

"Wally."

She sniffed. "Really? You know this don't work if you don't tell me your real name."

"My name really is Wally."

"Okay," she sighed skeptically. "Wally. Mystic Maria needs something from you to establish the connection to your mystic . . future!" she said finishing with a wave of her hands.  
"Um, I don't go around with a comb at all times like some people," said Wally casting a glance at Roy now sitting in the chair at the side of the tent where he'd been. As he did-

"Ow!"

Mystic Maria pulled an orange hair from his head.

"That hurt."

And she dropped the hair onto the crystal ball. As before, there was a seeming thunderclap and flash of lightning within the crystal ball itself. The preliminaries, chanting and waving her arms went just the same as for Roy and then Mystic Maria asked Wally whether he wanted the future of his career or his romantic life told to him. Like Roy, Wally picked romance. Mystic Maria indulged in more hand waving and unintelligible chanting and then leaned in closer to the crystal ball.

"Ahhh . . " she said with some satisfaction. "I see you in the future. You are approaching an exotic looking girl. You are instantly smitten. But you are in some sort of costume . . a very tight fitting costume . . an extremely tight fitting costume . . "

Just as Wally was starting to wonder what if this woman saw him as Kid Flash, Roy spoke up.

"Of course, he's a ballet dancer!" Roy explained through a grin from the side of the tent.

"Ahhh, that explains it . . ," said Mystic Maria before turning to Wally. "You really do that, kid?"

Wally sighed. He glanced angrily at smirking Roy. What other option was there?

"Yeah," he said before limply adding, "I live for the dance."

Roy's snicker turned into snorted laughter. "The minute he gets out of school he's in a dance belt and tights," guffawed Roy.

Wally brandishes a fist toward the teen archer. Enough, you!

"Come to think of it, you do look like the skinny pretty boy type who wants to show off," said Mystic Maria.

Wally glared at her then Roy then back at her. She returned her focus to the crystal ball.

"The girl you are smitten with . . is taken with you as well . . but you also fight."

"What? I-I would never-"

"You fight. The two of you fight. It is hand to hand combat . . you and the girl who instantly won your heart . . and-"

"Oh, come on! You're just repeating his!" complained Wally pointing to Roy now grinning more than ever.

"I . . I see you two figting . . you and the exotic girl . . and she . . she knocks you out-"

"What? That's crazy. I wouldn't fight a girl but if I did I sure as hell wouldn't lose."

"No," declared Mystic Maria flatly. "You lost. She beat you up and knocked you out."

Wally fumed through multiple sighs.

"She . . . has you captured . . perhaps tied up or somehow . . restrained and you two talk and fall more in love and . . she lets you go . . . and then you are together, each other's true love," she declared with finality.

Wally stood up angrily. "Look . . Maria. I would not fight a girl but if I did I would certainly not lose to her."

"Awful tough talk for a ballet boy," snorted Maria to guffaws from Roy.

"You . . you just recycled his future and gave it to me," complained Wally. "Get the hots for a girl, fight her, somehow freaking lose to her and, presto, happily ever after. Puh-leaze!" He stalked out of the tent followed by Roy.

"What a waste of ten bucks," grumbled Wally. "You know how much fried dough I could've got for that?"

They groused a little bit longer but saw that it was almost time to meet up with Ollie and Dinah again and started toward the park entrance. When they got there, Ollie and Dinah were waiting. Dinah asked them if they'd had a good time. Wally said they had and recounted some of what they'd done, leaving out the parts about Roy going off with that blond girl and Mystic Maria's telling of their futures. He lauded Roy's incredible aim and ability to win at all the games. Roy added almost nothing to his account and soon they were back in the Bentley and riding home to the Queen mansion.


	3. Carrot tops hanging out

Once back at the Queen mansion, the boys continued to go around as Roy and Wally. But, now that Roy was giving Wally a tour of the mansion, they were distinctly rich boy Roy and poor boy Wally. Roy wasn't actually arrogant about things. He didn't have any particular interest in showing things off to Wally anyway. It had been Dinah's suggestion that he give their guest, Wally, a tour. It wasn't arrogance, it was Roy's matter of fact attitude as he described things that set him apart from awed Wally.

"And this is . . another guest room, the one with the gold accents in the walk in closet, I think."

"This is the game room. Pool. Classic pinball machines. Ping pong. A poker table. Wii, X and all the others."

" . . the sauna's over there through that door past the far corner of the indoor pool . . . and down this hall is the private theater."

Wally couldn't believe it. Each part of it was amazing enough but the sum of it all left him in awe. He'd seen nice houses before. Uncle Barry and Aunt Iris had a nice house but nothing like this. This was a completely different way of living. Anything you wanted was right there. And the best of it. Wally idly wondered what life would be like with all this at your disposal. The walk in closets were bigger than his room at the tiny West house back in Jump City. The whole West house could fit in some of these rooms, maybe not height wise but the footprint, the ground that their dilapidated little house covered could actually fit in some of these rooms.

Wally wanted to ask all sorts of questions about the things that Roy was showing him but kept it to a minimum partly out of a feeling of embarassment at how poor he and his family were compared to Roy and his.

By the time Roy was done showing him around, Dinah was calling for the boys to sit down for dinner. The meal was served at a 40 foot long dining room table that looked perfectly suited for Buckingham Palace. Dinah sat at one end, Ollie at the other and Roy and Wally sat on opposite sides in the middle. Asking for anyone to "pass" you the salt or the pepper meant asking for them to get up because no one but the Elongated Man could have handed a shaker to anyone else across the huge table. Wally had two steaks and extra helpings of all the vegetables, too. Along with the food looking like it had been prepared by a chef, because it had, it tasted that way and it was a relief to Wally to not have to hide that he had a speedster's appetite the way he always had to at home.

After dessert, Wally followed Roy up to his room where Roy gave him a tutorial in arrows, head, shaft, fletching and nock and all the various kinds he had and some new ones that he was working on as well as the characteristics of them, how they could be shaped slightly different ways to have different aerodynamic qualities. Wally asked all kinds of questions, frequently interrupting Roy. But Roy didn't seem to mind. He liked getting to explain this stuff. He couldn't with a civilian and nobody in the Justice League was going to sit still for a monologue about arrows from Green Arrow's sidekick.

He showed Wally some of his different bows, too, making sure to describe all the materials that went into each one to the science nerd speedster. Finally, he and Wally flopped down on Roy's bed to play a video game on the giant screen on the wall of Roy's room. Not surprisingly, it was all about archery. Each player was an archer in the outnumbered english army facing the french at Agincourt in northern France in 1415. The player had to try to take out as many french as possible, getting more points the higher the aristocratic rank of your victim was. Wally tried his best and got better with each successive time they played but Roy still whipped him. Some of the shots he made were just ridiculous, like putting an arrow into the tiny eye slot of a knight in armor's helmet from 400 yards away. Wally tried to do that a dozen times and couldn't come close.

Still, even though the competition was decidedly uneven, both boys were laughing and having fun. Dinah quietly approached the door to Roy's room at one point in the evening and was relieved to hear both Roy and Wally laughing.

"Take that one Pierre!"

"And another one, you cheese eating surrender monkeys!"

She sighed. Roy's favorite video game. The one where he plays a medieval english archer fighting against the french. Ollie tried to pretend otherwise but he was nuts about it too. It was a bit bloody but she didn't too much care what it was if it helped bring Roy and Wally together. She moved quietly back down the hall.

She went to check on them again before turning in for bed. She approached Roy's room silently. The room itself was almost ominously silent. The light from inside was unvarying. She wasn't sure whether that was good or bad. They could be staring angrily at each other after some sort of blowup. But when she peeked around the corner she saw why it was so quiet. They were both asleep, dozed off in place right next to each other lying face down on the expensive quilt. She smiled at the sight a moment, the two great budding heroes, then approached and gave each a nudge.

"Roy? Wally?"

They barely moved. She gave each a more significant push. They groaned and slowly snapped out of it and she turned off the video game and told them to go to bed before leaving the room. Roy started pulling off his clothes and Wally followed suit, yanking off his Diabolical Ennui t-shirt.

"What're you doing?" asked Roy down to only a pair of stretchy white boxer briefs with japanese characters all over them.

A still hazy minded Wally didn't know what to say.

"You're not gonna sleep in my room, are you? Christ, speedster, that's what we've got a half dozen guest rooms for. Just pick one."

Wally nodded. He looked around.

Oh.

Yeah.

And then he zipped off to the first guest room he saw. Behind the closed door he pulled off the rest of Roy's clothes that he'd borrowed and jumped into the bed. He felt tiny. It was a king size bed with a foot thick memory foam mattress. It was like sleeping on a cloud. In a minute he was out like a light and the next morning he was reluctant to get up. Dinah knocked on the door and called his name three times before he could make himself leave this incredible comfort. But the last time she knocked she switched the word "breakfast" for the words "get up". He zipped into the huge, opulent bathroom and showered in 15 seconds. He found a bathrobe and zipped down to the "breakfast nook" next to the kitchen where he greeted Roy, Dinah and Ollie and inhaled various pastries. Ollie spent the whole time reading the Wall Street Journal while Roy and Wally talked about archery practice. Dinah went back and forth from trying to elicit some social response from Ollie to talking with the boys.

They went to shoot, that's the way Speedy refered to it "we're going to go shoot" he told Dinah. They went to shoot in their hero uniforms. Speedy explained that he couldn't shoot as his civilian self because anyone who saw him would put two and two together and figure out that Roy Harper must be Speedy. So, they went to the cliff at the nearby coast as Speedy and Kid Flash. Speedy had a motorcycle that had a limited cloaking feature. It was a drain on the battery. You couldn't run it in the cloaking mode that made it invisible for more than 10 minutes at a time but the Queen mansion was only about 10 minutes from the coast. The teen archer skidded to a stop beside Kid Flash already waiting for him and tossed one of the two duffel bags full of arrows strapped to the back of the bike to the speedster. He slung the other one over his shoulder and walked to the cliff edge then kept going.

Kid Flash was frantic. "Um . . hey! Sp-Speedy? What the-what the hell are you doing? Speedy!"

Kid Flash moved hesitantly to the edge and peeked over. Speedy was climbing down a nearly vertical rock face to a flat sort of landing area about ten feet wide and three feet deep a third of the way down a hundred foot drop to a narrow rocky shore without any beach. A third of the way down to a fall that would instantly kill you, thought Kid Flash.

"What's wrong with up here?" he complained just as Speedy got to the flat landing and put down his duffel bag.

"No good. It's too wide open to anyone seeing you from behind or from the side. I want to shoot without worrying about that."

Kid Flash eyed the nearly vertical drop Speedy had casually descended. "Well, how . . how do you get down there?"

"Oh come on," chided the teen archer as he tested his bow. "You're a hero. You can certainly climb down 20 or 30 feet."

Kid Flash sighed. There was nothing about this that being a speedster helped you with and he felt like an idiot for going along with it but a moment later he found himself climbing down the rock face with a duffel bag full of arrows over his shoulder. There were enough tiny outcrops and jagged rock projections that you could use for grips to make progress but just barely. When he got down to the landing he punched Speedy hard.

"What the hell, archer? Why am I risking my life just to get a better spot from which to shoot?"

Speedy only grinned. "Didn't think you could do it, did you?"

"No."

"But, see, you could. Guys with powers stick to the same things all the time. Us guys without powers have to constantly innovate and challenge ourselves. "

"What. Ever," groaned Kid Flash, his pulse slowly returning to normal. He eyed Speedy warily for a while longer wondering if the teen archer would try to get him to do something else that conjured up the phrase "death wish". But Speedy was a flawlessly reasonable tutor the rest of the time. First he showed Kid Flash his special bow and how to hold it. Then he removed a specific arrow from one of the duffel bags, one with kind of a bulbous tip and shot it way out into the ocean. Wally was tremendously impressed. It must have hit the gently lilting ocean surface 700 or 800 yards out from the shore down below them. When it did, it suddenly opened up and expanded and unfolded into a floating target with a six foot wide disc shaped base on top of which was a three foot high triangular projection with a bullseye target facing toward them.

"Very nice."

"I bring the right tools to every job," said the archer over his shoulder before starting to give Kid Flash instructions. There was a lot of ground to cover though and Kid Flash had trouble taking it all in. Speedy could tell and decided to just show him. "Here. Like this," he said and drew back the bow string with one of the arrows. Kid Flash frowned watching him. He wondered if he should say something. It was so obvious. At a glance, he could tell that Speedy was hopelessly off in where he was aiming. He almost cracked a joke but, twing!, Speedy shot the arrow and to Kid Flash's amazement, it followed an almost corkscrew path, through rising air currents off the warm rock face of the cliff, through swirling air currents over the ocean water and straight to the target bobbing up and down with the waves in the ocean water.

Fwip!

His jaw dropped. The arrow stuck in the target. A bullseye.

"Ehh. First ring out from center," groused Speedy in dissatisfaction.

Kid Flash stammered. Never missing at the carnival games was one thing. Those were all from 10 or 15 feet away. This was-this was a moving target seven football fields away through two different swirling winds and it was bobbing up and down on ocean waves. He waited for Speedy to break out laughing at what great luck he'd had to hit the target from this far away considering everything. But he didn't.

"Try one," he said, handing the bow to Kid Flash. The speedster hesitantly readied an arrow. Damn. Trying to pull the bow string as far back as Speedy had was like pulling on a telephone pole guy wire. He grunted with the effort to approximate what he'd seen Speedy casually do for his amazing shot. He tried to remember just how Speedy had been aiming but when he let the arrow fly it followed a sort of sickly looking trajectory splashing into the water only three quarters of the way to the target.

He sighed and waited for Speedy to make fun of him.

"That's better than I thought you'd do on the first one," said Speedy. "You must've shot it almost 600 yards. You're stronger than I thought."

Kid Flash eyed him warily. Was this some sort of trick? "Well . . how do I do better?"

Speedy showed him, in exhausting detail. He was making all sorts of little mistakes that beginners always make, the wrong angle to his wrist, his elbow not high enough, not doing enough with the other arm holding the bow, etc . . etc . . etc.

Slowly, over a few hours, he got Kid Flash to the point where the slightly smaller speedster could also shoot arrows far enough to hit the target. But no matter how he tried or how he was coached, Kid Flash didn't have that inexplicable genius for seeing how to thread the arrow through multiple forces of wind and wave to hit the center of a small target seven football fields away. Speedy missed the target completely a few times, but only when the wind or current changed in the middle of his arrow's flight. He didn't hit the target dead center every time but he hit the target most every time and Kid Flash was awed.

After a few hours, Kid Flash's shoulders and arms were burning and he suggested they take a break and eat the sandwiches they'd packed into the duffel bags along with the arrows. Speedy was okay with that and the two heroes sat shoulder to shoulder with their backs against the vertical rock face looking out over the ocean on a typically beautiful California day.

"You aim so well, what's different from what you do and having a super power of never missing?"

Speedy just shrugged.

"I'm serious. You think I'm a total nerd but I'm a really good athlete besides just my speed and I can't come close to what you do, at the carnival games or out here."

Speedy just shrugged.

"Thanks for being such a good sport to take the time to teach me.'

Again, Speedy just shrugged.

The two ate their sandwiches in silence looking out over the ocean a while longer.

"So, um, what's your school like?" asked Kid Flash to try to start a conversation.

Speedy frowned dismissively at Kid Flash. "I don't go to school. I have private tutors, this old lady, Mrs. McGillicuddy, because Dinah didn't like how I was looking at this other one, Jennifer, a graduate student, and this guy Stanley that I run roughshod over. He-"

"Wait! You don't go to school? What? How the . . .?"

"I told you. I have private tutors. It's not that big a deal in Star City. You think any kid in movies or tv is going to school every day?"

Kid Flash stared in equal measures of envy and shock. "But . . . if you want to go to college how do you get in?"

"I'm gonna take the SAT's. But, hell, even if I totally botched it, Ollie would just give a college a new building or something and they'd let me in. Dinah would make him."

"How much time do you have class every day?"

Speedy shrugged. "Four . . five hours, sometimes more when I missed part of the day before. Sometimes that's going out to fight crime."

"Do your tutors have any idea what you're doing?"

Speedy snickered. "Are you kidding? I usually just tell them that I was somewhere else in the house but that they just missed me."

Kid Flash shook his head. The very idea was something he hadn't even imagined. Not going to school! God. "I-I would have such an easier time dealing with the stupid secret identity if I didn't have to spend six hours every day pretending to be shorter and weaker and slower and-and letting kids pick on me."

Speedy regarded his fellow teen heroe with another dismissive frown. "You let people pick on you? Oh my god! What the hell for?" he laughed.

"Flash said I have to, to," he made air quotation marks with his red gloved fingers, "dissociate my civilian self from the physical abilities and character traits others expect of Kid Flash in order to protect my secret identity."

"So . . Flash has you let other kids . . give you wedgies and stuff you in lockers and shit like that?" chuckled Speedy.

"Yes," Kid Flash groaned. "And stuff me in trash cans and trip me and generally humiliate me."

Speedy first laughed but then composed himself. "Sorry, bro. But, really?"

"Yes," answered Kid Flash through gritted teeth.

"Does it actually work?"

Kid Flash sighed. "Unfortunately, I think it probably does. Nobody seems to be onto me yet. The big thing is that everybody thinks Kid Flash is three or four inches taller than Wally West. See, when I became Kid Flash I was 11. I must've been just about to have a growth spurt or something. That's what Flash thinks. Anyway. I grew like three inches that moment, in the course of getting my speed, from the lightning and the chemicals. I told you about it."

"Yeah, I remember."

"And right after that I started wearing giant sort of stoner-ish clothes and always slouching. So, everybody at school sort of doesn't think I got to five four like I have and when I'm Kid Flash I'm always running or standing as tall as I can trying not to seem so small next to all the jerk cops. So, everybody thinks Kid Flash is easily taller than Wally West."

Speedy shook his head. "I wouldn't care what Green Arrow said, I would not let kids pick on me to help preserve my secret identity."

"Do you . . do you and Green Arrow get along okay?

Speedy shrugged. "Okay, for step father and step son, I guess . . . Allright . . . not . . all that well."

"Sorry."

Speedy sighed. "Things work well enough, I guess. Not that there isn't serious friction. When stuff like that JL Ape thing happens I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it at least some."

Kid Flash groaned. Ugh. The JL Ape incident. Gorilla Grodd trying to turn all the Justice Leaguers and every human being into an ape.

"Green Arrow got, um, turned into a gorilla, too?"

"Are you kidding," chuckled Speedy. "He was this 600 pound gorilla for five days. Stank like a motherfucker. We had to fumigate any room at the mansion he went into. I think I've got 5 gig's worth of pictures and video. He got gorilla-fied at the same time as Supes and Wonder Woman and J'onn J'onnz and Flash, too, right?"

Kid Flash nodded reluctantly.

"They sent him back down here for me and Black Canary to take care of," he said, obviously relishing the recollection. "Some of the time he'd be completely mentally Green Arrow but he'd fade in and out of this gorilla point of view. Like he was giving me shit about cleaning my room one time and I just started dangling a banana in front of him and he totally slipped into gorilla trying to get it out of my hands and pounding on his chest. He, haha, he even asked me to get him some certain leaves covered with ants to eat. So, of course I did and filmed him chowing down on 'em. Ahahahahahaha!"

When Speedy's buoyant spirits at recalling Green Arrow's humiliation finally diminished, he looked to Kid Flash beside him. "How 'bout you? They gorilla-fied Flash right?"

"Yeah."

"Did they get you?"

"What? No. Not that it didn't totally suck for me anyway."

"Oh yeah, how?"

Kid Flash sighed and started telling the tale.

It was a few months before. It was just another Saturday morning as far as Wally West was concerned. He was at home in his room reading The Abstract of Physical Security Systems when suddenly it changed. His Kid Flash ring zapped four times.

That never happened.

Two zaps on his finger, zzzt zzzt was a call from the Jump City Police Department. Three zaps was a call from Flash. It took him a second to even remember what Flash had told him four zaps was supposed to mean. Oh yeah, a Justice League call.

Zzzt . . zzzt . . zzzt . . zzzt!

There it was again, the second time to confirm. It took Wally another second to remember what he was supposed to do, get out of the house and out of sight to be transported up to the Justice League's Watchtower satellite within 30 seconds. He was immediately up off his bed and heading to the front door.

"I"m going to Aaron's house," he called over his shoulder as he went out the door, safe in the knowledge that his parents didnt know that he and Aaron weren't even friends any more because of Wally consistently not showing up when he said he would to fight crime instead.

He jogged at normal speed up the street and ducked into the woods then pulled off all his clothes and pulled on his Kid Flash uniform. Just seconds later he felt that freaky tingle that meant you were being beamed up to the Watchtower satellite. A moment after that he was standing in the bright, glass and stainless steel of the Watchtower transporter room looking at one of the more obscure Justice Leaguers, Mr. Terrific, operating the controls of the system.

"Kid Flash, reporting," he said all officious, unsure exactly what he should be saying in that situation.

"You're, uh, wanted in the lab," said Mr. Terrific distractedly, barely looking at the slender teen speedster, before turning to discuss something else with what seemed like a sort of odd looking astral image of J'onn J'onnz. But Kid Flash thought nothing of it. He zipped away and headed for the lab. Three levels up and on the right of the central corridor, he remembered. He was excited about the way Mr. Terrific had casually put it. "You're wanted . . "

Oh boy!

He zipped past several other Justice Leaguers on his way, not feeling so small compared to everyone this time. He was wanted! It did strike him that everyone seemed a little frantic. There were League members actually running from one room to another. Of course they moved at the rate of giant tortoises compared to a speedster but there was definitely something big going on.

Kid Flash zipped down the corridor to a halt at the glass doors of the Watchtower's giant lab. Flash had told him that they didn't want him and Kid Flash to vibrate through doors and walls unless they absolutely had to up in the satellite, so he stopped and then walked through the doors.

"Kid Flash reporting," he announced as he entered the 100 foot square room with its rows of tables and walls of incredibly advanced equipment. Most of the tables had test tubes and flasks and connecting wires full of fluids bubbling along and flames under glassware, experiments or tests in progress. At the far corner of the room, he caught a glimpse of Flash's uniform. through some corkscrew glass connections feeding an aquamarine blue fluid from a larger beaker into several smaller ones. He marched briskly in that direction but stopped just short. His eyes went wide.

It was Flash's scarlet uniform but it wasn't Flash wearing it. Bent over facing away from him was some sort of . . gorilla!

Kid Flash caught his breath.

Grodd!

Grodd, here in the Watchtower! Ohmygod! Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!

He went into a partial crouch prepared to attack at a nanosecond's notice as he tried to figure out just how he could attack the huge simian. He was a yard wide with a massive powerfull body. His tree trunk thick legs were not wearing Flash's boots. Instead ugly hair covered ankles extended to slick black feet. His massively wide backside widened further into tremendously powerful shoulders and at the end of arms that could no doubt easily crush him, ugly, hair covered wrists were exposed from not wearing Flash's gloves showing huge, slick black hands, or were they paws for a beast like this.

Kid Flash slowly edged around the side of the ugly beast still trying to decide how best to attack it. Grodd or whoever it was had a grotesque, almost cone shaped head that made the Flash cowl look ridiculous. His hideous face bulged the cowl forward just as unappealingly.

The teen speedster was about to leap at the gorilla or call for help from other leaguers when the creature turned half toward him.

It was at the same time as Kid Flash noticed that some of the hair on the beast's face was blond that he heard the voice.

"Ah, Kid Flash. Hand me that erlenmeyer flask."

Kid Flash almost fell over. The voice was that of his Uncle Barry, the Flash.

He gaped.

Oh god. Now he understood. Flash was a gorilla.

Oh god.

He'd read about and even seen pictures of Flash after his mentor had gotten all these weird transformations worked on him. Turned into a wooden marionette of himself. Turned into the fattest man alive. Flattened. His head expanded into a lightbulb shape a foot high. And there were a half dozen more the public didn't know anything about.

But he'd never been there to see it. He hated these events.

Flash was his hero. Flash was such a good man! He gave an incredible amount of his time and constantly risked his life to fight crime and protect people. The way some people laughed when he got turned into a wooden marionette version of himself or flattened into a perfectly smooth Flash mirror or made to somehow gain more then 800 pounds weight in under a minute infuriated Kid Flash. Did they not realize that he could lose one of these times? He could get stuck like that! It wasn't funny!

And combined with his anger at the public's lack of consideration to laugh at Flash was fear for himself. Because the same villains who would do these things to Flash would certainly do them to him, too. He was a Flash, too. He could get stuck . . like that. One minute the idol of millions, recipient of the luckiest break ever, super speed, the next minute stuck forever as a helpless wooden marionette version of himself. God! And he was scared because the way that Flash got out of most of these humiliating transformations was with his power of complete molecular control, his ability to consciously reshuffle his molecules if he chose. And Kid Flash just didn't have that power. His abilities and Flash's weren't exactly the same.

"Kid Flash!" the gorilla again speaking in Flash's voice prompted him. "The erlenmeyer flask please."

"Um, sure," said Kid Flash while reminding himself to keep it together. Keep it together. He zipped over and got the flask from one table and handed it to the bizarre gorilla version of his mentor, staring at the huge, slick palmed hand with thick dark hair completely covering the back of it as the hand took the flask from him.

"F-Flash?"

"Yes, Kid Flash?" said the massive, simian version of his mentor utterly oblivious to any cause for concern as he poured the contents of two different test tubes into the flask.

"Wh-what happened to you? You're a-a an ape!"

"Oh, you hadn't heard," said Wally's ape uncle. "We went out to deal with Grodd and walked right into an ambush. He sprung this new device on us, a 'gorilla bomb' he calls it. You can see what effect it had on me. But ape is an imprecise term, like 'cattle'. Orangutans are apes too. Technically I'm an eastern lowland gorilla."

Kid Flash had to steady himself on one of the lab tables. He tried to say something but only sputtered at the matter of fact way Flash spoke about having been turned into freaking gorilla, this gorilla Flash ambled over to the adjacent table again, moving in gorilla fashion, his torso horizontal and thick, shortened legs and lengthened arms bearing his weight.

"Wh-when did this happen?" Kid Flash finally spat out as his gorilla-fied mentor ambled back toward him.

"Oh, I should have realized how surprised you might be to see me like this. It was only three hours ago. We charged toward Grodd's renegades from Gorilla City and this sort of smoke bomb went off among us. Not ten seconds later this is how I looked," said the fastest ape alive patting his massive dome belly with both hands. "We're trying to figure out how it worked, Batman, J'onn and I. Quite an amazing scientific accomplishment, really. we don't know much at all yet. Did it work by topical contact? I present very little dermal surface to such a weapon but some. Or did it work by altering us from our respiratory systems outward, from our breathing it in and propagating the change through our circulatory systems? There was a brief burst of light, too, and perhaps that was the release of some sort of energy which transmogrified us. I can't say. But we did a complete genetic analysis of me and I truly am a gorilla with just enough human variation that I still have my voice and most of my mental capacities. After just 10 seconds exposure! Isn't that amazing? What a tremendous scientific accomplishment, don't you think?" he said and scratched his yard wide behind with one huge hand. "What an achievement!"

Kid Flash stared. His mentor, his hero was more interested in the scientific merit of his having been humiliated than anything else.

"Um . . yeah . . a-amazing."

"My physical transformation is amazing, Kid Flash," continued gorilla Flash while openly picking one massive nostril of his widened nose, "I weigh 597 pounds right now, more than 3 times my human mass of 177 and look at my cranium," said the simian speedster pointing to his head. "and my thick, comprehensive hirsutedness, all my limbs, they've all been reshaped, bone and muscle, one hundred percent. But as amazing as doing this to me is, the work he did on rapid change of my proprioceptive sense is-is even more astounding. It's only been three hours but this massive body feels perfectly natural to me. I walk and move as a gorilla perfectly naturally-"

Wally felt like he was going to be sick listening to Flash's glowing appreciation of this humiliation. Uncle Barry could over intellectualize anything! But maybe it wasn't how gorilla Flash was talking. Maybe it was his smell. Kid Flash sniffed and felt the nausea increase.

Oh god, he stank. Wally couldn't help making a funny face. It was a powerful stink that rose like a force field of stench off his ugly gorilla body. 597 pounds, huh? His formerly blond, blue eyed, meticulously groomed uncle now smelled like 597 pounds of locker room laundry marinated in swamp water. God. It made your eyes water, it was so bad. And if that wasn't bad enough, Flash now had some kind of super powered halitosis. He had bad breath that would knock a seagull off a garbage truck.

"- Even the aspects of my transformation that should seem offensive to me such as my huge belly," he cradled it in his massive hands, "or this thick coat of hair all over me," Flash rubbed the back of one hairy hand on his gorilla face, "or the diminishment of my phallus from a ninety ninth percentile six inches flaccid as a homo sapiens to a meager inch and a half as the gorilla beringei graueri that I am now doesn't bother me. I actually like it. This feels perfectly natural to me and I feel quite . . I guess proud is the best way to say it about my gorilla body. I-I feel quite fond of my tremendous mass, for instance. I can't even recall what my human body used to feel like, just three hours ago, and I look at you, Kid Flash, a fellow speedster and you seem like a hopelessly ectomorphic shape, that almost disgusts me."

Wally glanced down at his very slender self in his Kid Flash suit. Okay, I'm skinny but 'hopelessly ecto . . '! But rather than wallow in taking offense, his resolve grew. What kind of mind fuck would make a man like his penis being shrunk?

This was pure e-v-i-l.

Flash sat back down on his wide backside and looked at both his slick, mahogany hands. "If these gorilla fingers of mine weren't too thick for any keyboard, I'd like to type 20,000 words about what an amazing job Grodd did in transforming not only our bodies but our neural-kinetic interfaces. I can feel the slightest touch upon the hair coating my body, even complex experientially affected functions like our sexual desires. For instance, when I first saw Wonder Woman's powerful gorilla backside, well, let me tell you, Kid Flash, my diminished phallus definitely recovered some of its lost size. Amazing. If only we could convince a scientific genius like Grodd to take the power that can turn me into a gorilla and do something productive with it."

Wally was trying to think of something to say back to his gorilla-fied mentor when, suddenly, Batman was at his side. Kid Flash flinched. When'd he get in the lab?

"How's that last analysis going, Flash?" asked the dark knight and the simian speedster went back to his work remarking over his shoulder that it was only part way there.

"Come with me," said Batman to Kid Flash quietly but sharply and leading him to a room off the lab. Once the door closed behind them, Batman, stepped just a bit closer than he had to forcing Wally to look upward and spoke as though barely controlling anger.

"Flash needs to stay working. If you interrupt him he stops being Flash the scientist and starts wallowing in his situation."

"But I-"

"Right now his mind is controlled by his human impulses but some of the others without specific work engaging them seem to be sliding into being completely ape minded. If we're going to figure out how this was done to Flash and the others he has to keep working."

"I-I didn't try to stop him. I-"

"There's even a theory we haven't ruled out that this transformation may be contagious, with those most like the afflicted being those most susceptible to suffering the same or at least a similar transformation after a short period of contact," said Batman before looking slender, just turned 14 year old Kid Flash up and down. Kid Flash gulped.

"You seem like a probable spider monkey or chimpanzee to me."

"Wh-what?"

"Keep him working."

Batman had already spun around to leave the room when Kid Flash said it. He wasn't sure where it came from.

"You don't have to be a jerk about it."

The Dark Knight spun on his heels and again towered over him. "What was that?"

"I s-s-said that you didn't have to be such a jerk about it. I-I care a lot about Flash. He started talking about his scientific assessment of his . . his transformation. I didn't ask him about it or prompt it. If you think I'm going to casually tell Flash to shut up then you-you don't know anything about how I feel about Flash."

It didn't seem possible for Batman to lean any farther forward into Kid Flash's space but he did and grunted, "Do . . your . . job," then spun back around and left.

Kid Flash took a couple deep breaths then went out into the lab and helped Flash. At first, he had no understanding of what each step they were taking in all the various tests was for. But Flash was a natural teacher and gradually explained every aspect of every test they were conducting. The stench of his gorillafied mentor was hard for Kid Flash to endure at first but he gradually got to the point where he could ignore it. The same was true of Flash's epically bad gorilla breath. Kid Flash got the point where Flash put his huge gorilla arm around his shoulders and spoke to him from inches away describing what they were doing with one test and what they would do if the results went one way or another.

Kid Flash worked alongside his transformed mentor with total focus for several hours straight till Flash started to tire. Oh, he'd been distracted for a few moments here and there, the occasional glance down at the crimson bulge of his crotch confirming that it wasn't any smaller, the occasional removal of a glove to comfirm that no new hair ws growing. When they left the lab, there weren't any certain answers yet but a lot of things had been ruled out and Kid Flash felt a certain sense of accomplishment at how much they'd done. Flash just wanted to go to sleep and Kid Flash watched him go off to quarters which they were to share.

He was tremendously hungry and couldn't go to sleep just yet. He zipped over to the Watchtower cafeteria and piled his tray high with food. He didn't really know any of the other heroes well and just took a small table in the middle of the room. But it surprised him that as he was finishing the meals he'd heaped onto his tray, he saw that heroes were sharing tables in a circle around him but no one was taking a seat at any of the tables adjacent to him.

He rolled his eyes. He remembered the rumor Batman had mentioned that maybe the transformation into a gorilla was contagious. They all knew that he had just spent hours alongside gorillafied Flash. They think I'm going to turn into a gorilla and start them turning into gorillas. He zipped back to the desert station and got a couple bananas and casually ate them in front of everyone. He considered scratching himself or making sounds like a gorilla but decided not to bother. They want to think I'm turning into a gorilla? Fine. Go ahead.

He zipped away from the cafeteria and up two levels to the rooms for heroes staying over. But he didn't feel like going to bed. He continued down the end of the hall to the observation deck.

Because it was up outside of the earth's atmosphere, the view of the stars from the Watchtower were breathtakingly clear. Avid science student Kid Flash loved it. But this time, the view was better than ever because standing there at the railing was Wonder Girl.

Kid Flash caught his breath. Wonder Girl. The subject of his masturbation some 40 times. Wonder Girl!

Allright. Allright. Calm down. Don't be stupid, he told himself. She's beautiful. Guys must be after her all the time. She's probably heard every liine. Just be honest and be natural.

He sighed slowly to control his breath then walked up beside her at the railing.

"Hey," he greeted softly and immediately saw that understated was the right choice. She looked sad, near tears.

"Hey," she eventually replied limply glancing at him. "You're . . Kid Flash?"

Kid Flash nodded. "You're . . Wonder Girl, right?"

"Yes," she said before sniffling.

He glanced at the star formation in front of them out the clear super plastic window.

"It can't be the pink clouds of that spiral galaxy, ngc 300 that's making you sad. It's too beautiful."

She looked slightly startled and back and forth from him to the gorgeous view. "Huh? Oh, yes, it is. Are you an astronomy student?"

"Just a little," said Kid Flash. "Are you okay?"

She nodded through a long slow inhale then confessed. "I'm worried about Diana. It's horrible, this whole . . gorilla business."

"I heard. I'm sorry. I think I feel the same way about Flash. He does so much and risks so much and these crazy villains do things like this to us."

He put his red gloved hand over hers on the railing. Their eyes met. She turned toward him.

"I wasn't thinking. You're dealing with the same thing, aren't you? Your mentor transformed against his will. And he was so wonderful looking, so distinctly masculine with his strong shoulders and narrow but still surprisingly muscular hips. So distinctively masculine."

Kid Flash's thoughts went 5,000 miles an hour. If she likes Flash's physique then she must like the way I look. Wonder Girl thinks I'm hot! Wonder Girl thinks I'm hot! Not all these big barrel chested League doofuses, me!

Kid Flash felt unusually confident. He looked her in the eyes. "It's terrible now but it'll turn out okay, you know that, don't you?" he whispered. She nodded.

They'd both moved closer now. He was lost in her purple eyes. She lost focus in the blue of his. They both leaned forward and turned their heads. Their lips were just inches apart when she sniffed. He was left in midair where her lips should have met his. He heard her sniff again and opened his eyes. Her expression changed instantly to one of great distaste.

"By Hera!" she exclaimed leaning back away from him now and starting to run. "Your smell, your terrible smell! You must be turning into one!"

She was now running down the long arcing hallway away from him. "See J'onn J'onnz, Kid Flash! Maybe he can help you!" she shouted over her shoulder and went out of view.

Kid Flash was shocked. He ran a few steps after her, puzzled then sniffed at his shoulder.

Oh no. The horrible gorilla smell it was all over him now. That's why everyone stayed away from him in the cafeteria. It wasn't because they thought he was turning into a gorilla or contagious. It was the smell from the five or six times that Flash had put his massive arm around his shoulders explaining some chemical test and from the times he'd patted his back. He'd actually gotten so immersed in the stench he'd blocked it out.

"It's . . it's not what you think!" he half shouted and heard a door slam shut just out of view down the curving hallway. He was pretty sure he knew just which one it was. He had an idea. It was pretty desperate but desperate times call for desperate measures. He should be kissing Wonder Girl right now, Wonder Girl! Once she knew it wasn't him, he wasn't turning into a gorilla, it was just Flash's gorilla skin and hair oils transfered onto the Kid Flash suit . . ! Well, things would be as good as they could possibly be. He felt sure of that. Otherwise he would never have done it.

He looked both ways down the glossy hallway. There was no one in either direction. He pressed the side of his Kid Flash ring the way you had to to get it to open up and pulled off his uniform. He sniffed at his arm. Just as he suspected, the gorilla oils were only on the rubbery surface of the suit. They hadn't penetrated to his skin. He knocked three times hard on the door and positioned himself so that she would be able to see his upper body and one leg but not . . that. He put one hand over it, too.

He was still getting his feet just right when the door opened.

"If . . if you get close, you'll be able to tell that it was just my suit," he said starting to look up with a smile. "And, obviously, I'm not hairy at . . . all"

Oh no.

He'd started to see as he began to look up with a smile. No red uniform. No lasso. Black. Grey. Utility belt. Cowl.

Wally swallowed hard. He was naked in the doorway across from Batman. And the Dark Knight looked pissed.

"What. Are. You. Doing. Here?"

Wally stared, still trying to take in how completely and utterly wrong this had gone before finally stammering, " . . I-I thought y-you were . . Won-Wonder Girl."

"Do I look like Wonder Girl to you?"

"Um, no sir, Mr. Bat-Bat-Batman. You-you don't."

" . . . "

"Yes, sir. I'll-I'll get back to my room."

On the ledge overlooking the ocean, Speedy rocked back and forth laughing at the tale for most of a minute.

"Oh, god, you back talked fricking Bats and then accidentally flashed him! Ahahahahahaha! That's awesome. That really happened?"

"Yeah."

"And you really almost kissed Wonder Girl?"

Kid Flash nodded. "I was . . ", he imitated how he'd turned his head and leaned toward her to kiss. Speedy did the same thing back at him.

Kid Flash pushed him away at the last second. "Jesus, man, you almost kissed me!"

"You almost kissed me."

"I was showing you how far I went toward kissing her."

"I was imagining kissing Wonder Girl, too."

"Well you're wasting your time. If any of us teen heroes becomes her boyfriend, it'll be me."

"Maybe I will too."

"What do you mean, too? You can't be her boyfriend if I am."

"Maybe we could both make out with her."

"What? Is that even possible? I thought if you had three it had to be a boy and two girls."

"Uh unh. It can be two guys. It could be you and me and Wonder Girl."

"But, how would that even work? I don't want to be in bed with Wonder Girl with you there too."

"What if that's the only way you can?"

Kid Flash stared at Speedy trying to wrap his mind around this before finally sighing and waving off the whole thing. "Ahh, who am I kidding. Something always goes wrong for me anyway. She probably can't think of me without thinking of that horrible gorilla smell, anyway. I don't have that knack like you have. How can you just look a girl in the eyes like you did that blond girl at Six Flags and go off with her?"

Speedy only smirked.

"Come on, what's your secret?"

"You just know."

"What do you mean 'you just know'?"

"When you were going to kiss Wonder Girl, how did you know that you should?"

Kid Flash considered this and slowly nodded.

"You just knew," explained Speedy.

They shot the remaining fifty arrows and then went back to the mansion.


	4. Another furious girl

Back at the mansion, Kid Flash and Speedy changed back to civilian clothes, Wally borrowing some board shorts and a t-shirt from Roy and they went swimming. Black Canary and Green Arrow were gone. There was a note just inside the door.

_Roy and Wally, _

_Ollie and I are going in to Star City to meet with somebody about another of Ollie's real estate holdings. You guys stay out of trouble and we'll be back for supper._

Both boys understood that the underlining of their names was meant to communicate that they should spend the afternoon as Roy Harper and Wally West rather than as their superhero alter egos. And they had every intention of doing just that. They laughed and splashed in the nearly olympic size outdoor pool and played for a while in the game room, too. Wally could scarcely believe that he'd hated Speedy so much that first time they'd met up in the Watchtower. They seemed like such natural friends now even if Roy was a bit on the bossy side.

They weren't that far from supper when Roy's phone went off. The ring tone was part of the soundtrack from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Wally raised an eyebrow.

"Police call!" shouted Roy dropping his pool cue and starting to run toward the garage.

"How do you . . know?" asked Wally following after him, still in shorts and t-shirt while saying "you" clad in his skintight red and yellow Kid Flash suit saying "know". "You didn't even look at your phone."

"I've got it set up to play one ring tone on normal calls and that one when it's a police call. The police call a certain number and Ollie and I get a relayed call from a number that my phone recognizes," said Roy stripping as he went. By the time he got to the garage, he had his clothes off and was pulling on his Speedy uniform. He jumped on his motorcycle, flipped the switch for cloaked running and was almost out the garage door before Kid Flash could grab his arm.

"Where's the call? And what is it? Tell me! I can get there quicker!"

"Oh. The bank at the corner of 5th and Star City Boulevard."

A red and yellow blur was out of Speedy's sight in just a second. He sighed and accelerated as hard as he could. He had to be extra careful riding the motorcycle in cloaked mode because no one could see him. It wasn't all that different from his normal riding, though, if you go through traffic at 100 miles per hour, you're not really counting on people seeing you, either.

By the time Speedy throttled down and screeched to a halt at the street corner in question, there were two police cruisers blocking escape via 5th and four more blocking any escape along Star City Boulevard in either direction. Speedy immediately realized that the idiots doing this must've tripped the alarm. He got off his bike, bow in hand, and walked slowly but confidently toward the bank entrance till only half the distance away from it that the police were.

Suddenly, a red and yellow blur approached and there was Kid Flash beside him.

"Amateurs?" sniffed Speedy.

"Amateur."

"Only one guy?"

"One little guy in some kind of ridiculous shiny green and black outfit," said Kid Flash.

Speedy said nothing. He just looked up and down at Kid Flash's uniform clearing imparting his perception of irony in the criticism.

"Hey!"

"Well?"

"Anyway. I circled around the place a few dozen times and looked inside. It was closed. He was shouting at someone or some thing but he's the only one I saw. I was gonna take him out myself but I've never worked in Star City," said Kid Flash now adopting a whisper. "Cops are different in different cities. In Keystone, Flash and I would just do our thing. In Jump, they'd get all upset at us not checking in with them and making some kind of show of pointlessly respecting their 'thoritay!"

"Star City's more like Jump," Speedy whispered back. And with that, he strode over to the cop who seemed to be in charge. He was crouched defensively behind the opened door of one of the police cruisers.

"Speedy and Kid Flash here, Captain. Is this just what it looks like? Costumed nut doing a poor job of taking down this bank. No accomplices. No hostages?"

"Um, we don't know."

"Well, I circled the place twenty five or thirty times and I only saw the one little guy in the weird outfit," said Kid Flash.

Two other cops next to the police captain looked him up and down in his Kid Flash suit without words communicating the message "You're criticizing someone else's outfit?"

Kid Flash sighed and shook his head. It's functional!

"What do you two want to do, asked the captain?"

Just as he said that, an angry shout could be heard inside the bank and there was a flash of light. One of the doors at the main entrance of the bank blew open and stuck that way. A gust of wind from inside blew out deposit slips, bank brochures and other trash but there was no currency carried along with it.

"Stupid fucking vault!" a sort of nasally, high pitched voice screeched from inside. "You must bow to me! I'm the Raging Mage!"

There was another burst of light which, through the open door, could be seen going from the hand of a short guy, barely tall enough to see over the counters at the teller stations, to the shiny metal of the huge vault door. But it was just a light show. It didn't do anything.

Speedy chuckled and without a word started toward the bank. Kid Flash followed. Speedy readied an arrow.

"Uh, hey, Rumpelstiltskin?"

Fwip!

The little guy in the shiny black and green costume turned toward the door just in time to get a boxing glove arrow in the face. He went down. Speedy snickered as he loaded another arrow.

"You wanna come along peacefully or do you wanna get hurt?" he asked as he and Kid Flash now reached the bank door.

"I'm the Raging Mage!" he declared scrambling to his feet. "And you'll pay for that impernitence!"

"Impertinence," corrected Kid Flash.

"You too!" vowed the 4 foot tall would be bank robber. He had now circled around to the center of the bank, not avoiding the two heroes but seeming to want to confront them.

"Look, guy. There's us two heroes and a whole bunch of cops out there who probably need to fire their guns in anger as some kind of psychological release or something," said Kid Flash. "You're not gonna get away with this. If you stop now, maybe the judge'll give you some little kid sentence or something."

"I'm not a kid! I'm the Raging Mage!" he bellowed and Speedy lip synched the word "Mage" along with him. Now Kid Flash could see that the guy had a sort of magic wand in his hand. His shiny green and black costume had shapes on it like one of those M.C. Escher drawings where at first you see one color fish then you notice the other ones between them. His hat or headdress looked like the one the character Galactus wore in Marvel comics, thought Kid Flash.

He shouted something at Speedy and Kid Flash and pointed the wand at them. Kid Flash bolted to the side out of the way. But nothing happened. He shouted it again. Again, nothing.

Speedy sighed as Kid Flash returned to his side. "All clear?"

"Yeah. This guy's got nothing," said Speedy. He shot an arrow that threw out circles of heavy black cable pinning the little screwup's arms to his side. Kid Flash ran in and picked him up and brought him out to the sidewalk.

"All clear, Captain!" Speedy shouted, as the would be sorcerer kept up a steady stream of expletives vowing to bring his wrath down on Speedy and Kid Flash and all of Star City before Speedy grabbed a handful of bank receipts and stuffed them into his mouth to gag him. The police were rushing forward now and a Star City Times photographer took pictures of Speedy with his elbow on top of the would be thief's head. The cops rushed about checking on the damage to the bank and doing all those cop inventory and paper workish sort of things they always did. Speedy was interviewed by a reporter for the Star City Times and kept making little jokes about the Raging Mage's size.

"Kid Flash and I saw that it was only Gnomey the homey here inside the bank . . . so we confronted the midget mage or whatever it is he calls himself here . . . and that's when I tied little people here up."

Kid Flash snickered at all of it. It was pretty funny. But the Raging Mage was getting more and more furious listening to it. He seemed to be trying to shout something at Speedy through the wad of bank receipts but couldn't get anywhere with it. Now, the reporter removed them to try to get his side of the story. But the Raging Mage ignored her. He stared venomously at Speedy and Kid Flash.

"So, you think you're big men, huh, you two . . CARROT TOPS? Well, let's SEE!" the pint sized thief shouted. And Kid Flash and Speedy realized that no one had taken away the little goof's "magic" wand as he pointed it at them. For just a second, both teen heroes felt an odd sensation in the pits of their stomachs but that was it. The looked at each other. You feel anything much? Both shrugged.

The Raging Mage cursed a blue streak. MF this. GD that. "That should have worked!"

Speedy sighed. "Yeah, just like the one to take out the vault and another to stop the alarms. But you came up . . short every time." He took the wand from his hand and gave it to the police captain. He shoved another handful of bank receipts into Raging Mage's mouth to shut him up.

A minute later, the police were taking him away and Speedy was riding back to the mansion while Kid Flash was already there.

So were Dinah and Ollie.

The boys were just in time for supper. They told Roy's step parents about the call, how easy it had been and what a screwup the Raging Mage turned out to be. The whole dinner turned out to be one long session of the four of them recounting confrontations with crooks who completely bungled things. Wally recounted some of Flash's less taxing missions but the star of the meal was Ollie who turned out to be a great storyteller and to have had multiple encounters with crooks who simply didn't have their acts together at all.

After dinner, Wally and Roy played some more pool and some other games but not long after it was dark, Dinah and Ollie interrupted them, teling Wally that he should probably go back home now. He didn't want to. He was having so much fun hanging around with Roy. To go back to his tiny room at his family's tiny house was not a prospect to which he looked forward. Things were so much fun here.

But he shook hands with Green Arrow. And Black Canary gave him a huge hug. And he shook hands with Speedy. But before he could zip off, Black Canary asked him if he had a cell phone. He shook his head. Here, she said and handed him one that looked an absolutely non-descript clamshell style one but which, she explained, actually had several special features which she described. And, she explained, she and Ollie would be paying for it. Kid Flash was stunned. Really? Ollie nodded. He also told Kid Flash to not go running up a bunch of charges or to let his parents see him with it. It was mostly so that he could contact Roy and "us" without having to either use your home phone or go through the Justice League. Kid Flash thanked them effusively and then zipped off to Jump City.

He stopped in the woods up the street from his family's house and pulled off his Kid Flash uniform and pulled on his intentionally oversized civilian clothes and knit hat. His parents barely noticed when he walked in the door. He went to his tiny room and lay down thinking about what it would be like to live like Speedy and to have Roy as a brother. He had a very hard time focusing on getting his homework done for Monday's classes.

The only thing that helped him shift his focus back to his life in Jump City was the thought of Karen Parker. Tomorrow they would go to see a play together. A play! He didn't too much care what the play actually was. But here was a smart girl, and hot, too, and she wanted to go somewhere with Wally West! There were some consolations to Jump City after all.

It was with this date in mind that Wally West endured another day of boring classes, teachers droning about the same things they'd droned about the last class and other kids making fun of him. It didn't stop there. After trudging back home from school in his vastly oversized pants and shirt, he found that his little sister was already home, along with 2 of her friends.

Ugh.

For whatever reason, his sister's behavior would go from vaguely obnoxious to completely obnoxious when they were around. They would almost compete to make fun of his nerdyness and, keeping to what Flash had told him, he had to let them. He even had to intentionally trip and screw things up so that they would only laugh at him more and never seriously consider that he might be Kid Flash.

For a while he just lay on his bed reading, occasionally hearing snickers from the living room and glancing over to see his sister and her friends pointing and laughing at him. There wasn't much he could do. The door to his room didn't completely close. It had been added as an afterthought. It had been a 6 foot wide by 9 foot long connection to a garage that had since been knocked down. It now contained his bed, a small night table, a dresser, a mirror, a tiny closet of sorts and hundreds of books. On the few occasions when his parents bothered to look in Wally's room they would shake their heads at all the books and scan the titles of the ones on top. They wondered why their 8th grader son should be reading The Abstract of Physical Security Systems and Forensic Science Review. But they didn't pursue the issue.

It was almost 5 o'clock now. Karen Parker was due to stop by in an hour. Wally was already getting excited at the prospect. He decided to dress up a bit. He'd still wear his knit hat to hide his orange hair, the same color as Kid Flash's. But he'd wear a pair of dark chinos and a dress shirt that Aunt iris had given him. He'd show Karen Parker that she hadn't made a mistake in going out with him, that he wasn't just the guy shuffling along in junior high wearing jeans and shirts that looked like they could fit two of him inside them.

He went to the kitchen and got a glass of orange juice.

"Is that a drink or hair dye for you?" snickered one of his sister's friends from the living room.

He lip synched a laugh then gulped down the whole glass at once. He went back to his room and read some more then just a few minutes before six picked out the pants and shirt he wanted to wear. A disconcerting thought occurred to him. He hadn't worn these clothes in a while. Maybe he'd grown some since then. He already had . . certain troubles wearing most clothes, with his tiny waist yet speedster shape.

He waited a few more minutes. His sister peeked into his room from the kitchen.

"What're you, getting all dressed up or something?"

"Not that it's any of your business, but yes, I am."

"Why?" giggled one of her friends, the blond one.

"I'm going some place with Karen Parker."

His sister and her friends literally fell down laughing, gasping for breath and slapping the floor.

"Y-you? . . . Ahahahahahahaha . . !"

Wally ground his teeth together but said nothing.

He took off his socks and shoes.

"If you don't mind," he said, "I'm going to change clothes. The door doesn't close completely. So, could you please look the other way?"

"Like this Karen Parker girl will wish she had?" said his sister, her voice clearly getting further away.

"Ha ha," said Wally now pulling off his clothes.

"Where'd you find this carrot tops chaser anyway?" asked his sister.

Thud!

Wally fell over into his dresser. His sister and her friends broke into new laughter. "How can you trip in such a tiny room?" they chortled.

Wally didn't know quite how himself. All of a sudden he had this weird feeling in the pit of his stomach and a weird feeling like a wave of fatigue passing through him. He toppled into the dresser and said nothing in response to his sister and her friends. He pulled on the dark chinos and white dress shirt Aunt Iris had given him months back. And they fit perfectly. He'd been worried that they'd be too short or that his speedster butt would burst the seam in the back but they fit just right. The shirt was just right too. He sat down on the bed and pulled on a pair of dark socks and the loafers Aunt Iris had given him. Again, worries that they would no longer fit him proved unfounded.

He smiled looking into the full length mirror that rested on one stack of books and leaned against the wall. For once things were going right for him. He chuckled at how much he thought he'd grown in the intervening months since Aunt Iris had given him this stuff. He thought of himself as growing so fast and yet this stuff still fit him perfectly.

But . .

Hmm.

"That's odd," he muttered.

Wally'd bought the mirror at a Salvation Army shop. It was so old and worn that the black paint on the back of it was worn through here and there so that there were black flecks and dashes speckled throughout the glass surface of the front of the mirror that didn't reflect. It made a sort of marker for how much he'd grown. His eyes were now up to two sort of horizontal dashes of non-reflecting glass just over a vertical slash of non-reflecting glass just right of center.

Only they weren't.

They were a couple inches short.

What the . . ?

"No!" he half shouted.

In the background Wally heard his sister and her friends laughing at the frantic tone of his voice and demanding to know what was wrong with him now. But he barely noticed they were there. The feeling in the pit of his stomach was only growing stronger and he had a real problem now. Holding onto the sides of the mirror with both hands to be absolutely sure where his eye level was in it, he was now certain that he was somehow two inches shorter than he'd been just a minute ago.

"No," he frantically whispered. "Not now! Whatever this is, not-not now!"

He stepped back from the mirror, his mind racing about what to do. Maybe I could just stand up really straight all the time. Karen's only seen me at school where I always slouch to look shorter than Kid Flash. But if I always stand up really straight tonight . . .

And then another wave of whatever it was passed through him. He felt it even more this time. It rose up through him leaving him feeling like he'd been reshuffled. As the wave passed through him, wherever it was in him felt like it was pulled a foot forward then shoved back, first his feet then his shins then his knees, etc. . .

When it finished, his dark red knit hat dropped down over his eyes. He half turned around to bitterly complain about his sister or her friends pulling his hat down but they weren't in his room. And seeing his dresser and the rest of his room, he realized in despair that his hat had drooped over his eyes because he'd shrunk.

He was only four feet tall now.

With a rustle, his pants and shorts dropped to the floor. He frantically pulled them up but gave up on his now several sizes too large loafers kicking them gently to the far end fo the floor. He looked angrily at the shirst sleeve on the arm not holding up his pants. The cuff was well beyond his finger tips.

Just standing up straight wouldn't fix this. This was now complete humiliation. He heard his sister and her friends vaguely muttering something conspiratorially and pulled the door to his room shut tight or as tight as it would go. If his sister ever saw him like this, shrunk smaller than her . . !

He'd never be able to explain it!

He'd never live it down even if he lived a hundred lifetimes.

He was nearly hyperventilating now. Ugh. My first transformation. What do I do? What would Flash do? Except . . I can't do what he does! I don't have that control of all my molecules power that he has! I-

Breathe, speedster, he reminded himself.

Breathe.

He took several deep breaths and tried to reason it out.

Okay. Okay. So this has got to be some kind of delayed working of that little screwup, the Raging Mage's magic, right? So . . how do I get out of it?

The question still hung unanswered in the air as another wave hit.

Just like the last one, the feeling in the pit of Wally's stomach got stronger and then a reshuffling wave passed through him.

His pants and shorts dropped to the floor and he didn't bother to pull them up. His shirt was now so big that the ends of it reached the ground and he had to angrily swipe away his hugely oversized hat. He looked in despair at the middle of his dresser. He was now only 2 feet tall.

He almost cried.

What if he was stuck like this, the size of a dwarf, for the rest of his life. How would anything ever work out after this?

Again, nearly hyperventilating, he worked to control his breath and gradually got control. He realized his clothes were now useless and pulled off first his socks then his pants and shorts and then his shirt leaving them lined up from the far end of the room toward the door. He marched his shrunken self over to the mirror. He could see that he was still himself. He was still Kid Flash conditioned and shaped. Nothing had changed about his proportions. But he was only 2 feet tall. The ceiling of his room seemed to be 15 feet high, his bed 5 feet high and more than twice that long.

It was disorienting. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. He realized that there was still that odd feeling in the pit of his stomach. It wasn't as strong as when the reshuffling, shrinking wave was passing through him but it was still there.

He was vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps in the background, his sister and her friends going upstairs.

He tried again to think of what Flash would do in a situation like this. He tried to remember how Flash had gotten out of all the different transformations he'd suffered but nothing seemed to hold any particular hope for his own circumstance.

And then the feeling in the pit of his stomach increased again followed immediately by another reshuffling wave passing through him.

Just then, the doorbell rang.

When the wave finished passing through him this time, the feeling was gone from the pit of his stomach. Everything seemed stable. He suddenly felt sure that the horrible shrinking was over. But as Wally glanced around his now canyon sized room he realized that he was only two inches tall. He confirmed it by zipping over to stand next to the ruler resting vertically against the night stand beside his bed.

Oh god. I'm two inches tall.

The doorbell rang again.

His sister and her friends came running down the stairs.

"Wally, are you gonna get that?" his sister shouted.

Wally looked down at his miniaturized self not even as tall as his own shoes with the crappy carpet of his room shin high on him now. "No," he muttered in a voice only audible there just off the carpet. "I'm not gonna get that. I couldn't open the door the way I am now."

To his chagrin, he could hear his sister and her friends get the door.

"No! Just let her go away," he pleaded toward the now impossibly large, seemingly 150 foot high door to his room. He could hear a muffled conversation and then steps coming toward his room.

He zipped frantically up a t-shirt hanging out of the lowest drawer of his dresser and then in among the contents of the half opened drawer which he knew included a jock. If there was one thing he was sure they would never touch in his room it was that. Through the mesh of the elastic of the pouch he watched his sister speaking to Karen Parker who had stepped just inside the front door. His sister opened the door to his room explaining to Karen Parker. "He was here just a minute ago . . here are his clothes," she said pointing to his shoes, socks, pants, shorts and shirt lined up successively toward the door to his room.

"It looks like he took all his clothes off, doesn't it?" laughed one of his sister's friends and the others added their own guffaws.

They turned and looked around the tiny house. You could see from one end to the other inside. They briefly walked over to the bathroom at the far end glancing around for Wally and then pronounced that he must've taken all his clothes off and then run outside.

"No! That's-that's not what happened!" complained tiny Wally inaudibly from the dresser drawer. But his sister and her friends settled on that explanation with absolute certainty and it must have made some impression on Karen Parker because she got a sort of look of distaste on her face and stormed out.

"I-I'm a Flash not a flasher!" Wally corrected them from the dresser drawer then sped up and out of it and up the quilt on his bed and up a few inches of wall to the window overlooking the yard. He may have been tiny but he was still tiny with super speed.

From the window he saw Karen Parker was marching back to the street saying, "If you're out here Wally West . . !"

He leaned against the glass with a feeling like surrender.

"Why does this always happen to me?" he complained then sighed. "Oh, what the hell would it matter right now. It's not like girls will be lining up to be with a guy hung like a field mouse."

His sister and her friends laughed and laughed at the idea that he'd gone totally insane and was somehow outside naked. Of course, he was inside, naked and only two inches tall so he could only take so much offense. He was also not very inclined to take umbrage at the attitudes of his sister and her friends because he was nearly overcome with feelings of depression about what had happened to him.

All his barely tamped down feelings that the whole superhero thing was unfair to him rose to the surface.

I have to give up all my friends! I can't be open with my own family in order to protect them! I let kids make fun of me at school. Cops snicker at me. And I don't make a dime off it, not a fricking dime. And now I have to put up with this, too?

He slid down the bedspread to the floor like going down the escape slide from the door of a jet liner and sat there wallowing in his feelings of how unfair this all was for quite a while. He was only jolted from these depressed musings by the sound of a voice and footsteps approaching his room. He realized that it was his mother and that she must've gotten home a few minutes ago.

He retreated to a spot under his bed. It was there that he saw his Kid Flash ring. It must've come off his hand and bounced over there when he'd shrunk. He zipped over to it. It was almost crotch high on him now and the size of a bean bag chair. He realized he'd have to try to trigger the mechanism that would eject his Kid Flash suit from it. It would still be skin tight. The suit was made of some kind of half rubber, half spandex looking material that Flash had invented. When it was first exposed to the air it expanded rapidly so that it was almost full size. But after just a second of contact with oxygen, it would start to try to shrink back down to being an inch high from cowl to toes.

As bad as the situation was, at least if he was wearing his Kid Flash suit it would become a super hero issue and not a question of what the hell had happened to Wally West. People expected bizarre things to happen with super heroes.

He squeezed the ring in a sort of a bear hug trying to trigger the mechanism the way he always did with one finger when he was full sized, push on this one spot and then pull that piece of metal upward. He grunted and groaned with the strain of it but couldn't seem to make any headway.

Then he heard his mother approaching closer. He moved behind a couple books, only checking to see that he was hidden from view not checking to see where he was standing. And that was a big mistake.

His mother was gathering laundry for a load of wash. He heard her grumbling about the way her son had left clothes right in the middle of the floor and then he saw her giant arm reaching under the bed for the shorts and t-shirts on the floor there. He didn't think anything of it till suddenly he was yanked along the length of the two books he his behind and then catapulted into the air faster than any amusement park ride would ever be allowed to. He'd had one foot inside the now seemingly six foot long loop of a tag on an undershirt and when his mother had gathered up the undershirt she'd yanked tiny Wally into the air.

He barely stifled the urge to scream and found himself summarily thrown down to a soft landing amongst a bunch of his other clothes in a laundry basket the size of a barn. The damn tag was twisted tight around his leg resisting his efforts to free himself. He thought to just vibrate himself free but he was being carred three feet high, what would be the equivalent of nearly a hundred feet high. He couldn't survive a hundred foot fall. Besides, as near as he could tell his mother was holding the basket at her waist. He couldn't risk dropping down and vibrating into her leg. So, he just kept working at the tag wrapped around his leg. But, somehow, with each additional item shoved into the basket from above the damn tag just wrapped more tightly around him.

Then, a loud sound was followed quickly by a sensation of falling. He was being thrown into the washer with his own clothes!

He scrambled up through the pile of his shirts and underwear clawing desperately to the top and just as he did, looked up and got what seemed like a hundred gallons of liquid detergent showered down on him.

He spit and shook himself like a dog trying to shed all the sticky, soapy stuff but couldn't get it all off. And then the lid of the top loading washer slammed shut and things went dark just as water started gushing in.

The water flowed in from the other side of the center plastic piece of the washer. Wally had to climb around to that side of the clothes and huddle under the lukewarm torrent for a minute to get the soap off him. But he wasn't sure what to do next. He didn't want to be in there when things were spinning and so he climbed up the side of the perforated cannister and managed to get up into the small curled edge of the lid so that he waited out the whole wash cycle from there. When it was over, he heard his mother approaching and dropped down into the wet laundry. When she was transferring everything to the dryer he managed to scramble away.

But he was hungry now, very hungry. He sped up the side of the table leg and over to the pound cake. He ate handful after handful. At least if he was going to be tiny, food would seem plentiful. But just as he was enjoying the feeling of his hunger being sated, his sister approached from one direction and her friends from the other. He panicked and vibrated into the now empty box that had been the container for the pound cake.

With her seemingly unerring sense for making things difficult for him, his sister went straight for the empty box and while gossiping with her friends absentmindedly crumpled up the box, with miniaturized Wally inside it and threw it in the trash.

Well, this tops it all, sighed Wally squeezed but not hurt and upside down within the crumpled box. Thrown in the trash by my stupid sister.

It took him 10 minutes of wriggling and climbing down to get to the bottom of the trash can amidst all sorts of bad smells. From there he said, fuck it, and just vibrated out the side of the damn thing hoping that no one would see the tiny flesh colored blur as he zipped back to his bedroom. And that's just what happened. No one saw him.

He had to take a bit of a risk not just to avoid bad smells but because he realized he had to do something as soon as possible. He had to warn Speedy.


End file.
